Like all of this author's books, this relies on breathless overstatement rather than good writing or taut plotting to move things along, and camouflage plot holes. That makes it a two-star thriller, but I add two stars for some insider details about hedge funds and central banking in the mid-70s, then take one of those stars away for some egregious misstatements.

The basic set-up has a lot of promise. Two main characters are juxtaposed. One is a shrewd Jewish New York hedge fund manager similar to George Soros at the time, the other is the scion of an august Swiss banking house whose disgust at corruption has led him to join the Swiss financial police. In classic thriller tradition, the adversaries discover they are the same under the skin and end up sort-of cooperating to fight the more evil characters. An interesting twist is they are only partly successful, which takes away some of the dramatic punch of the climax, but makes the story more realistic and modern.

The book does not live up to its promising set up. Too much time is spent on complicated interactions with tangential characters, none of whom are compelling or credible. The author clearly has ticking-time-bomb thriller pace in mind, but bogs it down with extended times-out. The timing of the climax is bungled completely.

On the plus side, there are fascinating details about the days of two-person hedge funds making $10 million dollar bets, very different from the thousands of employees and hundreds of billions the top funds wield today, yet still driving world financial affairs because almost no other private investors had any skill or risk appetite. While the author oversimplifies the transitional world between the gold exchange standard than ended with the Nixon Shock and the free-exchange world that had taken hold by the end of the 1970s, he does get the basic economics and psychology right.

On the minus side, the author throws everything but the kitchen sink into a plot that really depends only on central bankers versus hedgies. There's the oil oligarch, Russian mandarin, drunken burglar, French nymphomaniac and grumpy, disillusioned old cop; it's like a hack film director casting his actor buddies from different movies. And there's silly stuff about organized crime, wheat sales, torture and debauchery. Thrillers should be lean and taut.

One fascinating note is that this early Erdman book makes fun of people who extrapolate trends without understanding that action generates reaction. For the subsequent 40 years until his death, Erdman made a career out of being spectacularly wrong extrapolating trends. It's hard to believe the sensible guy who wrote this book could have changed so much so fast.

This was an interesting read, a financial thriller is not a category I have read before. I enjoyed it quiet a bit.