EMMA LATHEN – Going for the Gold. Simon and Schuster, hardcover, 1981, $11.95. Pocket, paperback, 1982.

   Reading this latest adventure of banker-detective John Putnam Thatcher is something like finding yourself caught up in a huge science-fictional time warp. The Winter Olympics have always had more visual appeal than Wall Street will ever have, but to enhance it even further, Miss Lathen relates the story of a snowbound Lake Placid as it might have happened, in some alternate universe adjoining ours only tangentially.

   Imagine, if you will, any or all of the following: the presence of a mad sniper who picks off a French ski-jumper in mid-air; a popular female skier who is falsely accused of taking drugs; a scandal in procurement kickbacks; and the kidnapping of the acting president of the IOC by an entourage of angry Swiss athletes.

   In their anxiety to cover the inspired performance cf the U.S. hockey team, ABC-TV and all of the other real world media seem to have missed everything else that was going on!

   Sloan Guaranty Trust’s greatest concern, however, is an incoming flood of counterfeit Eurochecks. Since the intricacies of the forging operation are also essential to uncovering the killer’s identity, it’s a case right down Thatcher’s alley. The rest of the proceedings are happily infused with equal doses of implausibility and déjà vu, and then laced with a good healthy belt of wry– humor, that is.

Rating:   B minus.