[The formula for Helen MacInnes's novels, a quarter century after she began writing them and most recently in The Salzburg Connection,] remains much the same, a couple of non-professionals inveigled into taking a hand from—hold your breath—patriotic motives with the good guys against the bad, the adventure taking place in some attractive foreign part—Venice, Delphi, in this case Salzburg. In the waning days of World War II, the Nazis sank a chest containing the names of important collaborators into a remote Austrian lake and set up a ring of fanatic agents to guard it—shades of the Rheingold. Twenty years later, it is brought to the surface and everyone wants it: the Nazis, the KGB, Peking, and of course the Austrian, British and American secret services. Into the churning situation walk a young American lawyer and an attractive publisher's representative (female) and, after assorted kidnapings...