Notable

TENDER PREY by Patricia Roberts

Doubleday; 263 pages; $13.95

The year is 1935, the place New York City. A widow named Mary Stephens answers a personal ad in the Police Gazette and, in the time it now takes for a letter to be mailed crosstown, gets a new husband. John James settles down in her basement apartment and then, after a few weeks, disappears with Junie, the younger of Mary's two daughters. The surviving daughter, Alice, 13, grasps instinctively what Detective Jim Hackett of the department of missing persons grimly suspects: the little girl is dead, a month shy of her tenth birthday, and a madman is at large.

First Novelist Pa tricia Roberts, 46, follows the formula of police procedurals closely enough to make mystery readers comfortable and adds enough variation to keep everyone alert. Hackett realizes that Alice is his best and only hope for information. John James (a pseudonym, apparently) said things in front of his stepdaughters that might lead to his identity; the detective must coax Alice into remembering snip pets of conversation that she did not understand in the first place.

The case is solved both surprisingly and quickly when all the clues are in place. That may take longer than it logically should, but Author Roberts makes the material stuffed in between events at least as interesting as her plot. Hackett 's affair with the wife of a philandering husband is sexy and poignant, a tough embrace shared by two adults with equally damaged illusions. Similarly, the Depression, its grinding poverty and hero-worshiping tabloids, keeps threatening to push from background to foreground. In side the competent puzzle posed by Tender Prey, there is clearly a bigger novel and a promising novelist.

BARON JAMES: THE RISE OF THE FRENCH ROTHSCHILDS by Anka Muhlstein Vendome; 223 pages; $17.95 When James Rothschild arrived in Paris in 1811, he headed straight for the most fashionable part of town to rent rooms. At 19 he was leaving behind the suffocating congestion of the Frankfurt ghetto and embracing a city that 20 years earlier had become the first place in Europe to accept Jews without any legal re trictions. Young Rothschild was as drunk on the future as were the Parisians: abandoned the dietary laws, changed name from Jakob to James -- Anglicisms were then in style -- and undeterred a brutish appearance and a thick German accent, began his conquest of the Bourse and the glittering salons.

James was the youngest of the five brothers who became financiers to all ofEurope, more powerful, certainly more perspicacious, than of the headsof state who depended on them. The Rothschild bank of France (nationalized by President Francois Mitterrand last year) was James' power base. He gleefully courted aristocracy and believed firmly in maximum ostentation, but he was also a passionately hard, meticulous worker and a militant family man.

Though he shed the regimen of Orthodox life, he never lost his Jewish identity, and became an inexhaustible and intelligent philanthropist.

Anka Muhlstein, a Parisian who has written about Proust and Queen Victoria, gives a vivid account of the Rothschild empire, the brothers' enormous shrewdness and energy, their speculations and boundless reserves of money, their private "code" for sensitive business letters, and their swift couriers.

Muhlstein is sensitive and enlightening when she juxtaposes the culture of the ghetto with that of Paris. It is, however, in her sophisticated writing about money that she shows her true colors: she is the baron's great-great-granddaughter. sb This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.