Puppet on a Chain by Alistair MacLean

PUPPET ON A CHAIN

Paul Sherman of Interpol's Narcotics Bureau lands at Schipol Airport. As far as he is aware no one but Jimmy Duclos knows of his arrival in Amsterdam. Duclos is there to meet him--and four men are there to meet Duclos. Sherman has to recognise that the gang of heroin smugglers he was out to smash know his movements as well as he does. 
   Backed by Amsterdam's police, Sherman tries to outwit the genius behind the drug ring, a master-puppeteer who knows how to manipulate the underworld so that his own tracks are obliterated at every step.
   The action moves from the back streets of Amsterdam to a barge on the Zuider Zee, from an island whose inhabitants specialise in making costumed puppets, to the crypt of a missionary sect's church. Not until the very last minute is the master-puppeteer revealed - and by then he is in possession of a puppet of such value and beauty that it taxes all Sherman's ingenuity and courage to prevent this one, too, from swinging on a grisly chain . . .

"Paul Sherman of Interpol's Narcotics Bureau flies to Amsterdam on the trail of a dope king . . . 
With enormous skill the atmosphere is built up: Amsterdam with its canals and high houses; stolid police; psychopaths; beautiful girls in distress; and murder, murder, murder. Everything that Alistair MacLean writes is an immediate bestseller. With this book, he will make another killing."
Sunday Mirror

A top-drawer effort filled to bursting with murder and mayhem ...
If you have any red corpuscies in your blood, you will find your heart pumping triple time . . .One of the best books in the Greene-Ambler-MacInnes tradition that I have come across."
New York Times