RATES AND ROGUES THE SET-UP By Paul Erdman St. Martin's 342pp $24.95 Charles Black, former investment banker and hard-as-nails chairman of the Federal Reserve Board, quits his job at the Fed in a struggle with the White House over rising interest rates. But he's persuaded to stay on for a while as a special envoy to represent the Fed at the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), the Swiss-based institution that serves as the industrialized world's clearinghouse for payments and monetary information. So imagine Black's rude surprise when he arrives in Basel for one of the BIS's regular monthly meetings. Instead of the warm welcome he had been receiving for the past four years as Fed chief, he is arrested, jailed, and charged with using his exclusive knowledge of U.S. interest-rate moves to mastermind the most audacious insider-trading scheme ever. If that doesn't make you want to start reading Paul Erdman's latest financial thriller, The Set-Up, I don't know what would. As the title suggests, Black is no more than a fall guy for a conspiracy cooked up by a shadowy Sardinian financier, a conniving Swiss lawyer with a desk full of secret bank accounts, and the real inside trader--a corrupt president of the Swiss National Bank. In this mix of characters lies the potential for a Hitchcockian drama of a victim mixing it up with his tormentors as he tries to clear his name. Yet Erdman let me down. The Set-Up journeys from San Francisco and Washington to Switzerland, Sardinia, and the wilds of Alaska, where the plot against Black falls apart. But along the way, you begin to wonder why you should care about Erdman's one-dimensional hero and his cardboard-cutout wife. This isn't North by Northwest, and Charles and Sally Black aren't Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint. There are plenty of annoying errors in The Set-Up. Erdman manages to misspell the name of legendary Fed chairman Paul Volcker and mangles the title of his fictional Fed boss. Even more critical, Fed chairmen almost never attend the monthly BIS get-togethers of global central bankers. That job goes to the Fed vice-chairman or the head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Erdman's leaden prose and Tom Clancyish digressions into the minutiae of global finance also don't help the story's flow. Where Erdman does stand out is in his description of a Swiss jail--no surprise seeing as he spent three months in the Basel hoosegow in the 1970s during an investigation of a commodities trading scandal. He also keeps things moving with his descriptions of shady Swiss lawyer Hans Zwiebach and crooked central bank chief Samuel Schweizer. Both come off as men of impeccable social standing but flexible moral character. That's an all-too-common shortcoming among the Swiss big-money set that Erdman seems to have studied closely during his past life as a doctoral student and banker in Basel. It's a pity that his insights into the character of Fed chairmen are comparatively modest. Perhaps if Erdman had put more effort into this area, The Set-Up would have been a better read. As it was, I began to find myself hoping the Swiss would throw Black into prison and toss away the key--just to make things interesting. By WILLIAM GLASGALL RELATED ITEMS PHOTO: Cover, ''The Set-Up'' Return to top of story

Updated June 15, 1997 by bwwebmaster
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