Stir up the ingredients of a good,...

Stir up the ingredients of a good, fast-paced story and you’ll flush forth the usual: romance, passion, suspense and three-dimensional characters. But it’s more than coincidence that an extra edge is found in the novel that carries with it another ingredient: villainy, pure and simple. Black-heartedness running rampant is icing on the cake, and the popular fiction hitting the marketplace in August has it in abundance.

The publishers bill Rebecca Ryman’s work, Olivia and Jai (St. Martin’s Press: $19.95; 640 pp.), as “a novel of passion and betrayal in 19th-Century India,” and it is almost an understatement for this sweeping, powerful and complex story of entwining business interests, global politics and social back-stabbing in this--at the time--isolated corner of the British Empire. The year is 1848, the setting Calcutta, where the strong-willed Olivia, born, reared and educated in California by her writer-rancher-environmentalist father, has been sent to spend a year with her aunt, Lady Bridget Templewood, while the widowed father stakes new claims in far-off Hawaii.

It’s a rude, cultural shock for both niece and aunt--Olivia plopped down in the very proper, stultifying, atmosphere of colonial India where her uncle, Sir Joshua, heads Calcutta’s largest tea-exporting business--and no less so for Aunt Bridget, who has aspirations for mating Olivia (as well as her own daughter, Estelle) to, you know, the proper type of wealthy English peerage. Romance, however, comes in the form of Jai, a half-breed known locally, and hated by the British, as Kala Kanta, or the Devil, and the venom is particularly thick between the Templewoods and Jai. A shipper, Jai controls the only fleet of fast clipper ships plying the India-England route that all exporters, particularly the Templewoods, need desperately.

The ground is laid, aplenty, for scandal, treachery and intrigue as the affair between Olivia and Jai thickens, and as Jai and the Templewoods clash over coal (which Templewood needs to give his own ships a competitive edge with Jai’s clippers) mined by a Maharaja in northern India. But there are old secrets and villainies further intensifying the hatred between Jai and Sir Joshua--not the least of them being the relationship between the young Sir Josh and Jai’s dead mother. This is an incredibly complex story line where it is only possible to scratch the surface of the racial, economic and emotional conflicts that ultimately tear the Templewoods apart, and Jai and Olivia apart as well.

While author Ryman is an admitted pseudonym--because, as an Indian, her extended family might be embarrassed by the passions described in “Olivia and Jai”--it is impossible to believe that this masterful and beautifully crafted novel of romance and intrigue against such a lavish background could be a first effort. This is a skilled and articulate work that is a Literary Guild and Doubleday Book Club alternate selection and for which foreign rights already have been sold to nine countries.

Consider the case of a born loser named Salvatore D’Amore, a case which Marcel Montecino explores in detail in Big Time (William Morrow: $19.95; 488 pp.). Life for New Orleans-born-and-reared Sal should have been kinder--as a teen-ager he had tremendous potential as pianist, vocalist, songwriter and arranger. Instead of following his agent’s urging to make a break for the big time, D’Amore chooses the line of least resistance: trading on his local fame with one-night gigs.

In his 30s, he is reduced to occasional bookings but works, primarily, as a bartender booking bets for the New Orleans Mafia. And this is a crowd no one in his right mind would try to double-cross--like pocketing the customers’ bets on the assurance that, of course, they’ve picked the wrong horse. Except that, from suddenly being $70,000 in the black, Sal is even more suddenly $170,000 in the hole and, in a crowd where holding back a $2 tip from the Mafia can get your kneecaps shattered, a debt like this has extermination written all over it.

In “Big Time,” author Montecino is following up on his earlier best seller, “The Crosskiller,” with a chase story that is as beautifully crafted as it is blood-chilling. For the New Orleans Venezia family, neither time nor distance can save Sal D’Amore from paying the ultimate price for betrayal--and doubly so when one of its prize hit men, tracking Sal to Waukegan, both fails in his mission and never returns to New Orleans. (Never mind that a heart attack did him in--the Valenzias have added murder, now, to Sal’s dossier).

Fleeing abroad (although he can’t really breathe freely there, either), Sal falls in with beautiful teen-ager Isabel Gemelli, who is not only the heiress to a Gucci-type Brazilian leather fortune but, more important, has a God-given pop music talent that--with the right training--could catapult her to inter- national fame. Even as he flinches at sudden noises and unexpected shadows, Sal is drawn in spite of himself to the shaping of this girl, and his own dormant talents as writer, composer, arranger and teacher explode as they never could have in New Orleans. It’s a deadly mix as Sal’s involvement with Isabel throws him more and more into the international pop-music spotlight--the same spotlight that it is essential he avoid when it draws him back to the United States and the Grammy Awards in Los Angeles.

This is a real hair-curler of a story that explores the seamy side of New Orleans’ underworld as well as the glitz and political maneuvering that goes into the making of an international pop-music star. How, or can , Sal ever free himself from the relentless, narrow-eyed killers stalking him? We’ve taken a blood-oath never to tell.

The “what if?” story line has tantalized novelists since the beginning of time (“what if” the South had won the Civil War?), but few have had the temerity to apply it to a dramatic episode so recent in time, and so loaded with characters whose survivors are still extremely powerful, as has George Bernau.

In Candle in the Wind (Warner Books: $19.95; 499 pp.), Bernau takes a bold stance: What if the 1962 death of Marilyn Monroe by drug overdose hadn’t resulted in her death, and what if that overdose hadn’t been either suicidal or accidental but a botched homicide attempt? But, hey! We’re talking fiction here, so it isn’t Marilyn Monroe, but Marilyn Lane, and the handsome movie star who plays a key role and is related by marriage to the White House is, actually, Paul Townsend (wink!). The attorney general of the United States is Tommy Kerrigan (wink!); the President of the United States is Jack Kerrigan (wink!), and Marilyn’s ex-husband is a failed prizefighter instead of a you-know-what (wink!)

Discovering the naked body of the love goddess, comatose and hovering near death, in her Brentwood home, Townsend sends for a cynical Hollywood private eye, Frank Galvan (private detective to the stars) to help spirit Marilyn to a hospital for discreet treatment. A nice logical-enough beginning for a “what if?” story, right? Except that the star disappears; her private doctor turns up murdered; a housekeeper also is dispatched, and the capable Galvan sudfdenly finds himself surrounded by villains of all shapes and descriptions as his hunt for “the most popular movie star in the world” leads him into the bowels of Baja California.

He is far from alone in his search--there are Mexican desperadoes after her, a shadowy hired assassin (in whose employ?) and equally shadowy CIA and White House agents. Which of them, like Galvan, are out to save Marilyn? Who are out to finish the Brentwood job?

Bernau, whose earlier work, “Promises to Keep,” was well-received, does a masterful job here in weaving fact, prevalent myths and artful fiction into a fast-paced thriller that races from Los Angeles to Baja, back to Los Angeles and then to the East Coast--Washington and then a narrow wooden bridge over the chill waters of Triondak Bay near the Maryland coast. There are plots tumbling on top of subplots, and there is enough skulduggery--at the international level, the national level, the Hollywood level and at the human-passion level--for a dozen books.

This is an ingenious puzzler with tightly paced transitions of time, place and character that make it almost impossible to put down. Not once--and this is the critical measure--is there a note of incongruity . . . not one temptation to say: “Ah, c’mon, it couldn’t have happened that way!” Unshakeably: It could have. And who among us can say it didn’t ?

In Lois Battle’s new work, The Past Is Another Country (Viking: $19.95; 412 pp.), we have an absorbing tale of three women who had been together as girls at a strict Catholic school, St. Brigid’s, in the remote western area of Australia--three women with widely divergent backgrounds who go on to lead widely divergent lives, but whose paths cross as adults and who, in retrospect, have crossed paths with each other more than any would have dreamed.

Consider, for instance, Megan Hanlon, who had lived in Australia with her aunt and uncle while her American parents had worked in America, and who is now a promising American screen director on the verge of winning her first Oscar for a documentary and who is looking for financial backing for her first feature film. In the meantime, shy, retiring Greta Papandreou Burke is an Australian farm wife married to the internationally known surgeon, Tasman Burke. Finally, there is Joan, the Mother Superior of St. Brigid’s, formerly Sister Mary Magdalene, the youngest and most unorthodox (and, therefore, the best liked) teacher that Greta and Megan had had.

Brought back together by a high-society party feting international film makers lured to Australia by the Academy Awards, the three are reunited--and the villain, time, has made profound changes in their lives. Joan, under the new freedom permitted by the Catholic church, has taken back her own name, gone to college and fallen in love with her professor--has almost strayed from the church for him--but has returned to her first love, and duty, as Mother Superior at St. Brigid’s. Megan and Greta--the former with a failed marriage behind her and the latter feeling the need to break away from her dominating surgeon husband to exercise her own creativity--are equally restive. The reunion will resolve the hunger for independence that both of them feel--and that Joan, in her own way, has solved.

This is a story of three strong-willed women, each grasping for her own niche in life and ultimately finding it.