V for Vomitous?  How about Vile?

The Paris Vendetta
Steve Berry
Ballantine

I travel a lot and, well, frankly, I'm nosy.  When I'm in the lounge, at the gate, or even sitting on the plane I often take a good look around and see what people are reading.  I run across quite of Nora Roberts -- either writing as herself for the women travellers and as J.D. Robb for the men.  Sadly, I still see a lot of Dan Brown.  (Did I tell you that when I joined a dating site I automatically closed matches where the "best book" read was The Davinci Code?)  Lately, I have also noticed that a lot of people are carrying around novels by Steve Berry.  They seemed like something that might interest me, so I picked one up.

OMG -- what a mistake.  Let's just say The Paris Vendetta was not a work of literature.  Former spy, Cotton Malone, gets pulled into a web of intrigue by one of his close friends and allies, some Dane name.  Dane is looking to avenge the senseless of his son and Cotton agrees to help.  The murderers, as it turns out, belong to The Paris Group, a collective of extremely wealthy individuals who are hatching a plan to manipulate the global stock markets to their advantage.  Throw in a Corsican connection, Napoleon, and a little bit of conspiracy and voila!  Yeah, it is a stupid as it sounds.

I'm not going to pollute the grading system that I have established on this blog by giving this book a rating.  Maybe it suffered because it was what I read directly following The Power of One.  Maybe it just sucked.  I will leave it to you to decide -- if you go there, caveat emptor definitely applies.