PUPPET ON A CHAIN

Suprasuspense this time, and Amsterdam's the scene of a nightwatch far darker than Rembrandt's as Major Sherman of Interpol and two of his young handmaidens, Maggie and Belinda, attempt to crack a narcotics ring. From his contact who is killed hideously in front of everyone on his KLM arrival, to the waiter on drugs who lurks in his room, to the girl -- the daughter of Amsterdam's narcotics bureau chief -- who can never be withdrawn from her habit, to a warehouse with puppets on chains and a barn where there's a scene as horrific as anything that happened at Auschwitz -- Mr. MacLean clobbers the reader into another kind of insensibility. But he does so with the unhesitating assurance that he'll hold your interest and at that he might.