MEET ME AT TAMERLANE'S TOMB

Barbara Corcoran stoops to foreign intrigue when fat, fourteen-year-old Hardy Harlow visits Samarkand with her family and falls ""hopelessly, unrequitedly, nauseatingly, marvelously in love"" with Paul, her sister's drummer boyfriend. More attentive though is Mr. Kemal, a Turk who sometimes wears western clothes and limps and sometimes lurks around dressed as a Moslem. Kemal, it turns out, wants Hardy to take a smuggled necklace of purported sentimental value to his daughter when the Harlows fly to Moscow; Paul says Kemal is a dope smuggler and of course he's right, but Kemal is so insistent that he kidnaps Hardy's younger brother Andrew in order to win her compliance. It's all improbable, cliched and silly and a long way from the comfortable ambience the author can wrap us in when she stays closer to home.