Depending on your point of view, Matthew Bannon is either really lucky or really unlucky. One day while coming home from class at his art school, he comes across a violent assassination, which is assumed to be a terrorist attack) in New York City's Grand Central Station. The victim worked for the Russian Mafia as part of a diamond smuggling operation. The problem is that he was embezzling some of the diamonds for himself, and his higher ups wanted him rubbed out. Before he died, he was able to hide the diamonds in a locker near him.

Matt actually runs across the bag of diamonds, which he soon learns has the value of about $13 million. This is a major book for a struggling young artist. As you can guess, the Russian mob is not about to sit around and let the diamonds disappear. They hire the Ghost, an assassin who just rubbed out the diamond thief, as well as another assassin out of Germany to hunt him down in a competition.

While Matt starts to use his money to take his girlfriend (and his art professor) on a trip to Europe where they tour Paris and Venice, only to find their travels disrupted by the assassins' intrusions into their lives on a number of levels.

This is a quick-paced and action-paced story that would make a great movie. It is a fun read, though, the reader really has to dispense with the need for everything to have any sort of realism as subplots swirl, including an incestuous relationship between a mob boss and his daughter, a secret past for one of the good guys, and the odd fact that no one seems to mind that Matt and his professor have a pretty obvious relationship.