The Paris Vendetta

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Downtown 2nd Floor 4-week checkout	Fiction / Berry, Steve	4-week checkout	Due 05-17-2024

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Great addition to the Cotton Malone series submitted by vickik on September 30, 2019, 11:33am The Paris Vendetta is the fifth book in Steve Berry’s series of thrillers featuring Cotton Malone, a former U.S. Justice Department agent, now a rare book dealer in Copenhagen. It involves the quest for a lost treasure of Napoleon, and includes some flashbacks to Napoleon’s time. At the beginning of the book, a young Secret Service agent, Sam Collins, breaks into Cotton’s bookshop, pursued by assassins. He tells Cotton that the Danish businessman Henrik Thorvaldsen, Cotton’s friend and mentor, who had established him in his bookshop, is in danger. The two men flee to Henrik’s house and learn that Henrik has discovered who was behind his son’s death, which was referred to in previous volumes. A British aristocrat, Graham Ashby, is involved in a ring of international art thieves, and Henrik’s son’s girlfriend, a lawyer, who was killed with him, was about to prosecute him for his crimes. Now Henrik is bent on revenge on Ashby and wants Cotton and Sam to help him.

Ashby is also a member of a group of multimillionaires called the Paris Club, who manipulate the global financial market to their advantage. The leader is Elisa Larocque, a descendant of a Corsican family who were enemies of Napoleon. She and Ashby and their group are after the lost treasure of Napoleon, because it will make them even wealthier than they already are. Eliza also desires to avenge Napoleon’s injustices against her ancestors. Henrik joins the Paris Club in order to get close to Ashby and then kill him. The Paris Club believes the key to the location of the treasure is in a coded message in a book that Napoleon left to his son in his will, and Ashby’s girlfriend believes she has deciphered the code. But Ashby is really playing both sides: he is also working for the U.S. government and, in particular, for Cotton’s former boss at the Justice Department, Stephanie Nelle. Stephanie thinks Ashby is the only link to a terrorist who is planning an attack on Paris. Without him, there might not be a way to prevent the attack. Now Cotton must choose whether to help his friend Henrik kill Ashby, or whether to keep Ashby alive so the government can stop the terrorist.

As usual with Berry, The Paris Vendetta is an exciting, fast-paced thriller, full of twists and turns. The details about Napoleon’s life are especially fascinating, and, in his author’s note, Berry explains what is fact and what is fiction. At the beginning of the book, there is a scene where Napoleon goes into the Great Pyramid of Egypt and receives a prophecy which makes him furious. As Berry explains, this is a persistent legend, even though there is no solid evidence for it. Several novelists, not just Berry, have used it very effectively. I missed one of the regular series characters, Cotton’s friend Cassiopeia Vitt, in this novel, but the hotheaded young agent Sam Collins makes a great addition to the series. I also must warn the reader that the ending is heartbreaking, even though I will not go into details. I highly recommend this book, but be prepared for some tears.