A page-to-page turner more quickly at the beginning if the truth be told before all is finally ascertained -- nonetheless an action tracer in which Tad Putnam, a policeman via Yale Law school who drives a Mercedes, checks out a case which seems self-evident: Dr. Giovanna Verona, Johnny to her friends, a Systems Analyst and Designer, had stolen the tape known as Scorpio 5 and received 200,000 in cash. Her fingerprints are on the box where she buried it and she admits to it -- too willingly? Actually there is a man at the top for whom she's been the girl in the middle -- at the head of a German company which has all that money can buy. . . . Not Harrington's best but upper middle class with enough going on to fill in the space between auf and wiedersehen.