Re: Carte Blanche by Jeffery Deaver -- what do you think?
My impressions more or less echoed those of Napoleon Plural's.
SPOILER -
Was anyone else completely baffled by the (first) villain's plot when it was finally revealed? They spent millions of pounds and involved a network of operatives to replicate an experimental Serbian warhead that projected hypervelocity shrapnel... to kill a harmless drug researcher at the university he worked at, which would create a death toll of around 90 persons (by the villain's own estimates). They went to all this trouble to apparently deflect the blame onto the Serbians, for no good reason other than the mask the true killer. That's more convoluted than Octopussy!
What's worse is that their initial plan involved killing OTHER people in a more direct fashion, in order to achieve the goal of killing their main target in this oddball, convoluted way... whatever happened, to, oh, making the professor's death look like an auto accident or a drug overdose (you know, the classics!)
I just found it to be a very convoluted plot that really only existed to justify the existence of the story itself, as if the villains made their choices because they were purposefully trying to fill the pages of a thriller, not because it was the expedient action.
This could have been fixed if the villain's goal had been to undertake a false flag operation (say, take out a military facility and blame it on the Serbs, etc). For the simple murder of a drug researcher, it was ridiculously complex.