Puppet on a Chain (published in 1969) - authored by Alistair Maclean - the narcotics world and Netherland

Alistair MacLean is a Scottish writer who specialized in writing thrillers and crime stories. He was third son of a Scottish minister and joined the Royal Navy during the world war two. He was a senior torpedo operator at the height of his career. He was in the thick of the war theater during the world war and saw action on many fronts especially the arctic north. After retiring he started penning his novels based on the war he saw and many of them became best sellers. Maclean never looked back as a writer until his death in 1987.
Puppet on a Chain is Alistair MacLean's detective thriller set in the Netherlands. This book describes the underbelly of the city where drugs and devastation rule. The protagonist is Paul Sharman who is an ex army officer now head of the interpol Narcotics bureau and is based in London. He comes to the Netherlands to investigate a series of disappearances and drug offenses. The drug king pin rules the narcotic ring covering the entire continent. They use a wide range of torturous tactics to keep their hold on the empire. The title of the story gives away the method of torture applied by these drug lords to shut off dissidence.



As soon as he lands in Amsterdams Schipol Airport, he is ambushed and knocked down injuring his solar plexus. His only contact in Netherlands is shot down before his own eyes. The police seem very reluctant to pursue the assailants, but try to fix charges against him. Paul Sharman with him dry and sarcastic humor however decides to go ahead with the investigations. He is aided by two female operatives. One of them is an experienced agent and the other is a rookie. MacLean describes them as breathtakingly beautiful and I find this very uncharacteristic of him. His careless banter with these female operatives add zing to the proceedings.
Soon Sharman realizes that his presence is not desired in Holland and many times he is followed and ambushed. He is beaten and left to die and it is a wonder for many a reader how he escapes. Sometimes it almost borders on absurd, but he is the hero and the story must go on. So the nine lives that Sharman seems to leads saves him time and time again, and he follows his follower who lead him to a ware house which is filled with rubber toys and neatly stacked books. The books are called the Gabriel Bible and are scooped up from inside. Thee inscription outside the book reads "With the Compliments of the First Reformed Church of the American Huguenot Society". This sets his thinking process along the methodology adopted by the smugglers to smuggle drugs across the border.
The high adrenaline chase is full of boat chases and murders across Amsterdam. Sharman is a no nonsense thug who does not feel any qualms of bumping anybody. Soon he is fighting the war in the Netherlands and must save him and his associate. So who wins this cat and mouse game? No answerer's for guessing that! but there are many surprises while on the way. A great book for thrill seekers.

Strong Medicine (published in 1984) by Arthur Hailey, a book on the pharmaceutical industry

Arthur Hailey was born in Lutton, Bedford-shire, England. He served in the Royal Air force as a pilot in World War II. He migrated to Canada and has written best sellers like Airport, Wheels and Hotel. He moved to the Bahamas with his writer wife Sheila. Arthur Hailey died on November, 2004 leaving a legacy of best sellers and over 170 million books in print.
Strong Medicine, a typical Arthur Hailey potboiler, has him dissect the good and the bad of the pharmaceutical industry. Just as other Hailey books, he selects a public institution and develops the characters who make up this institution, and portrays how their attitudes and relationships form the ultimate pillar for the organization.
In Strong Medicine, Arthur Hailey examines the details of the women's march in their work place. In the character of Celia Jordan, he presents a talented lady trying to break the glass ceiling to reach the top most post of her company. She encounters chauvinistic behavior from all around and also support from certain men who are instrumental for her rise.



The Books begins by Celia reminiscing her life on her way to her home and is seen remarking to her husband about the threat faced by her because of a certain Senator Donaghue. Then Hailey takes us back in time where Celia as an young sales representative tries to market some of her drugs to Andrew Jordan, a young physician. He being in a very disturbed state of mind is very curt with her. Celia, understands that a medicine developed by her company, in the trial stage is capable of saving his patient. She cuts through the protocol and delivers it to him. Andrew administers this medicine and is able to save his patient.
They are married following a whirl wind romance and soon Celia is pregnant and a mother of 2 all through working her way up in her company. This is the most unbelievable part in this book because she has a picture perfect family and everything works according to her plan. Her babies are perfect, husband adores and encourages her and she has risen steadily in-spite of motherhood and all the odds.
In the company Celia has a very supportive boss, Sam Hawthorne who encourages her and is grooming her for succession. Celia delivers a speech in the annual company meet, castigating the lack of training, vision and leadership, rendering the top management furious. She is inches away from being fired, that Sam steps in to save her. All this happens with a perfect home-life, brilliant Kids who do well in boarding schools and a husband who whisks her to Ecuador to rekindle their relationship.
Celia hitches her star to that of Sam Hawthorne and is rewarded when he becomes the president. She being the vice-president soon realizes her ambitions. Both Sam and herself start two projects. First one is the Montayne project by the French who are developing an anti-emetic for pregnant women. Second one is to tap in to the British capabilities in pharmacy and develop a off shore research unit. They select a brilliant scientist, martin Peat Smith who joins their company after a lot of persuasion from Celia.
Celia has serious misgiving about the Montayne project and her fears are found to be true because their medicine causes congenital defects in the babies. Sam Hawthorne, who has profound belief in the drug had given it to his pregnant daughter, ultimately resulting in a handicapped baby. Meanwhile the FDA is hot on his heels about the drug and he is being blackmailed by an shady FDA official Dr Mace. The guilt drives Sam to suicide and ultimately Celia is in-charge of running the company. Felding Roth is being investigated by Senator Donaghue and Celia ultimately has to rescue it, earning the enmity of the senator. Soon after incidents of an affair with Martin Smith, power struggles with Gordan Lord and the financial rescue of the company Celia is firmly entrenched in her position. The book ends with her flying down to combat Senator Donaghue and appear before the senate's investigative committee. Apart from this sudden ending the whole book never fails to grip you and you come away with a belief that superwoman Celia will overcome the senator too.

Tom Clancy: Without Remorse

Without Remorse is an attempt by the author to explain the emergence of his other main character (the main character is Jack Ryan, but there is also a CIA operational executive called John Clark), the man who carried out a number of field operations including execution and even spying (with mention in many books such Clear and Present Danger, Sum of all Fears, Debt of Honor, Executive Orders, Rainbow Six, Bear and the Dragon). The movie is set in 1971, in the middle of the Vietnam War.
Most people know of the Vietnam War as a major disaster where the US lost 54,000 soldiers and where it had to beat a humiliating retreat, but the Vietnam War was also the one where the US military developed its special operations forces to a major extent, including the SEAL teams, trained in extraction, working behind enemy lines, underwater jobs, and enemy executions. The novel tells the story of one extraction, as well as the story of a former SEAL whose girl-fried was killed by drug dealers in a macabre way, and his revenge using all his abilities. Without Remorse refers to this fightback and the cold blooded way in which this former special operations man targets drug dealers without any pity.
In the Vietnam War, many Americans Prisoners of War were kept in bad Prisoner of War camps, ill-treated and many times not reported to the Red Cross. They were interrogated and treated very badly. It was a mission for the Special Operations team to try and extract them, but this was also a political mission, needing permissions from the political leadership, with the risk of such operations being revealed. In fact, a previous such operation had been a failure, and given that there were also peace talks ongoing, the State department did not want to agree to such operations due to the fear of the peace talks collapsing.
The hero of this book, John Kelly was a former SEAL and a hero who had taken part in many operations in Vietnam, being a part of the SOG (Special Operations Group). He is now retired, and is in pain, having lost his wife in a road accident. At this point, he meets up with Pam, who has escaped from the torture of a brutal drug dealers network where she was one of the couriers as well as the comfort women for the drug dealers. However, as she is getting cured, in an exaggerated sense of bravado, Kelly exposes her to danger and she is taken from him (while he is shot to a near death state). She is soon killed by them in a particularly brutal way.
As Kelly recovers, he learns, and and that is when he vows to use his specialities to hunt down her killers (in a pretty well written part, the nurse and his future wife, Sandy, sees death in his face, a controlled and determined death). He starts his mission of recovery while the police case does not go anywhere. He is also approached by the military for another rescue mission in Vietnam because of his knowledge of the location. For this mission training, he is given a CIA moniker, John Clark, and starts training with the military.
He also starts dealing with the drug dealers, first finding the dealer who started Pam onto the life of prostitution, killing him, and then starting to kill more of them after interrogating them to find out about the main drug dealers, no mercy involved. In fact, were it not for the fact that Clancy was writing about death and murder, those are very well-written and detailed sections. He also rescues a girl and hands her to Sandy Toole (the nurse who helped him), thus making it clear to Sandy that in fact John is doing the drug dealer killing that is making the newspapers. When this girl is also killed after being rescued, he suspects that the police is also infiltrated and is more convinced that the drug dealers need to be killed. There is a very detailed section on the interrogation of one of the capture drug dealers using a standard compression and decompression chamber.
He rescues more girls, and in a stand off, kills the drug dealers behind the killings of Pam. By now the police have identified who could be behind this, although they have no evidence against him. In his rescue mission, he fails somewhat because the rescue mission has been leaked, but he kills the brutal Camp Commander and captures a Soviet air officer who was interrogating the prisoners. This is used to transfer the prisoners to a safe location so that they would not be killed.
In the end, Kelly gives up his identify and becomes a full fledged CIA person by faking a boating accident as he is being pursued by the police and the Coast Guard.