It's not often that the words "virgin" and "Jackie Collins" are to be found in the same sentence, but, reader, I was that virgin.

My youth was never quite misspent enough to have embraced The Stud or The Bitch (or more than a few paragraphs of Harold Robbins), and thus it had remained. The Power Trip confirmed some fears, but left me with a sneaking admiration for Collins's ability to get her readers to turn a page.

The opening section of the book is the stumbling block, and unfortunately that section takes up roughly 175 of 500 pages. The set-up is that a Russian oligarch and his beauty-queen partner are hosting a week-long party on their luxury yacht, and have invited five couples to join them. Meanwhile, an old rival of the billionaire has chosen this cruise as the perfect opportunity to launch an attack on him with a group of Somalian pirates.

However, before she gets them together on the yacht, Collins spends a long time letting us get to know these couples, and it's during these seemingly interminable chapters that this hefty hardback is at greatest risk of being flung against the nearest wall. There's a narcissistic footballing couple; a reptilian senator and his wife; a gay Latin pop star and his uptight English boyfriend; and a Hollywood heartthrob who plans to dump his latest girlfriend when they get ashore.

Almost without exception, they're physically gorgeous specimens obsessed with career advancement and social status. The only real exceptions are globetrotting journalist Flynn and his friend Xuan, a Chinese refugee who spends her time trying to persuade the oligarch to donate money to good causes.

Once aboard the yacht, with the clock ticking down to an attack, The Power Trip becomes much less of a chore to read, even as it became apparent that there would be no twists, no surprises, nor any disruptions on the way to an inevitable conclusion. Collins may be a thriller reader, but she's not a natural thriller writer.

And, though the paciness of the latter part of the book is very engaging, it's as though Collins has pitched her prose to dovetail as seamlessly as possible with supermarket tabloids – the overall style, the details, the unquestioning acceptance of the values of Hollywood and of fame as a virtue in itself.

Harold Robbins, though ... worth checking out?