“THE VENETIAN BETRAYAL” BY STEVE BERRY
Cotton Malone—a character we met in Berry’s previous novel, “The Alexandria Link”—is a rare-book dealer and a former Justice Department agent living currently in Denmark. Narrowly escaping a blazing fire in a Danish museum, Malone learns from his adventurous friend, Cassiopeia Vitt, that this was a part of series of fires across Europe caused by a fanatic leader of Central Asian Federation in search of Alexander the Great’s elephant medallions. Thus, unwillingly, Malone finds himself smack in the middle of geopolitical game between the world’s top power brokers and the winning prize lies in the lost tomb of Alexander the Great. Cassiopeia and Cotton, together with some of the old friends, fight against time and the enemies to solve the ancient puzzle and find the lost tomb before it falls in the wrong hands because the solution can either save or destroy millions of people.
As you can imagine from the short description of what the novel is about, it is a suspense thriller spanning a few countries, with action and adventure on nearly every page. And you would expect a fast-paced read that would keep you up until the wee hours of the night. However, it is not quite so. Although Berry is a pretty good writer and I did enjoy his two previous novels, “The Venetian Betrayal” falls into the same lines as “The Alexandria Link” and for me it simply made the novel slightly too predictable.
While it was intriguing and quite exciting the first time around, it makes this book somewhat boring and slow-paced. The action is there, the characters are the familiar heroes with a few new villains, the historical data is nicely intertwined with the fictional events and an adventure follows and an adventure—all the makings of a great suspense novel. Somehow, however, I cannot muster enough excitement to finish it and I can almost tell you how it will end.
Therefore, if you don’t mind a certain level of predictability, characters that are nearly one-dimensional and have not developed in the slightest since the last time you met, and only looking for some thrilling but meaningless entertainment, “The Venetian Betrayal” is a book for you…