Customer Reviews

The Set-Up

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Once again Paul Erdman displays a vast knowledge of the world of money. A man who has headed the Federal Reserve Bank is set up by a shifty money man who is laundering money for a shady character from Corsica. The former banker is jailed for a crime he din not commit. Thanks to his wife and her will to not give up he finally gains his freedom. The shifty money man and his partner are killed by the shadowy character from Corsica. Paul Erdman has the ability to write financial books and make them very readable. This book is a good example of this. Buy it. You will not be dissapointed.

I'm still on my quest for a Grisham-like financial thriller, and Erdman is the best I've read in that genre so far, though it's not quite Grisham. I've read several other authors in this genre including Stephen Frey, Michael Ridpath, among others, and Erdman is the best of the group. I just wish he had more fiction work out there. I found this book to be a fast-paced, easy read that I completed in 2 days. I'd highly recommend it.

P.S. I'd also recommend checking out Erdman's book Zero Coupon; it dates back to the 1970's, but it's still among the best out there.

Charles Black, a former investment banker and a tough-nut chairman of the Fed quits his job 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, Switzerland for one of the BIS's regular monthly meetings. Instead of the warm welcome he had been receiving for the past four years as a 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.

Intrigued yet?

As the conspiracy begins to unfold, Black finds himself no more than a fall guy for 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. The Set-Up journeys from San Francisco and Washington to Switzerland, Sardinia, and the wilds of Alaska, where the plot against Black falls apart.

On the good side, Erdman keeps things moving with his descriptions of shady Swiss dealings, and prison life. Big Swiss heads come off as men of impeccable social standing but a 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 life as a doctoral student and banker in Basel.

But this is also my minor grouse with the book that is supposed to be more of a thriller than a treatise on global finance. Expect a fair bit of digressions into the minutiae of international banking including an introduction to the innards of derivatives markets. Which was great for me personally, but these are in fact slightly piquing in terms of the novel's flow.

Nonetheless this is all worth the ride if you are in the market for a financially inclined thriller. Recommended.

If you like financial thrillers, you can't go wrong with Erdman, and he's at his best here. Usually the loose ends of "thrillers" bother me for years after I've read them; years after I've read this one I still admire the neat way he ties everything up nicely.

I just wanted to add a slightly less positive review of Erdman's "The Setup". This is a good quick read suitable for the airplane or beach -- it is fast-paced, enjoyable escapism a la Grisham. But my big complaint is that the plot wraps up too easily in the last 50 pages; everything falls into place much too quickly and with no resistance whatsoever. This lets some of the air out of the tires of an otherwise decent plot. But if you have six or seven hours to kill and you don't want to read anything too mind-intensive, then I would certainly recommend this book. Who knows, you might even learn something about currency trading along the way.

I love financial thrillers and have read most of Paul Erdman's fiction, but this is by far the best. Not only does he expertly take the reader through the world of derivatives investing and international banking, he paints a picture of Switzerland from Zurich's Bahnhofstrasse to the most remote parts of the Alps that makes you long to get on a plane and go there (and I have been there--it's worth it). The plot moves fast, from the point of view of every character; his knowledge of German, Swiss-German and Italian is impeccable, and the story culminates in an around-the-world chase that keeps you from putting the book down. I can't wait for his next one.

I was a young GI in Germany in 1969 just learning to appreciate "the Trib." I remember one article that caught my eye: a young American banker working in Basel at the sub of a California bank was arrested for trying to corner the world cocoa market! He failed miserably, and in the process wiped out his employer's equity base. As if the young banker, named Paul Erdman, did not know enough about Switzerland already, he was to learn more, from many months inside a Swiss jail. I next noticed Erdman several years later. He had written a novel, "The Billion-Dollar Sure Thing." I read it and liked it, and later learned that he had begun his novelist's career in that Swiss jail. Erdman's subsequent novels have never disappointed. He is the master of the financial thriller, an unfortunately under-populated genre. "The Set Up," like all of Erdman's fiction, takes place largely in Switzerland. Charles Black, former Chairman of the U.S. Fed, is arrested at the Basel airport as he enters Switzerland. (Erdman reminds us, as he never fails to do, that Basel's airport straddles the Swiss/French border.) He finds himself in the maws of the Swiss power structure, comprised of a hundred or so rich and powerful Swiss men who are, in Erdman's eye, as amoral and as slimy as any in the world. No Swiss Heidi-types here. (Had Erdman been successful in cornering the cocoa market he would have been hailed, not jailed, by this group for furthering the cause of Swiss chocolate!) To divulge any more of the plot would be cheating. Suffice it to say, there is lots of (1)German- Swiss bashing,(2)Deus ex machina that stretches credibility, and (3)untranslated "Schwietzer dooch" and other languages. There is also a woman/mate of the male hero who is sharper than the hero himself. This theme is present in most Erdman novels. Erdman has produced eight novels in a quarter of a century, about one every three years. When I haven't seen one for a while, I start looking in book stores. This year I did something different: I searched for Erdman at amazon.com. Sure enough, he'd written a new book which I ordered immediately. The several days it took to arrive in the mail was an eternity as I anticipated reading a new Erdman. It arrived, and did not disappoint. Erdman remains at the top of his form!

This is the first novel I've read by Paul Erdman it is proved to be a very enjoyable experience. He truly does know how to weave a compelling tale of financial intrigue. The only thing that prevented me from giving the book 5 stars was the latter part of the story. 80% of the novel is spent explaining the financial shenanigans of the culprits, and how they came to do what they did, but the novel seems to wrap up everything a little too quickly at the end. I would have liked to have seem additional pages devoted to the reaction of the culprits when they saw their carefully laid plans slowly falling apart, and how their families, mistresses, the police, and the prosecutor reacted to these developments. I mean....imagine the enormous international implications that would come with the uncovering of a conspiracy to frame the former head of the Federal Reserve for insider trading!

I found it very refreshing to see a hero and heroine who were "mature" and have a little bit of age and experience on them. And it was their wisdom, experience, and network of contacts that come with age that enabled them to outwit their opponents. It was also interesting that the main villain of the book reveals very little about himself, and we as the reader never find out that much more about him than do the book's main characters. He stayed "mysterious" up to the end! In a way, he reminded me of a villain straight out of a James Bond film...extremely wealthy, great strategist, very commanding, but polite and gentlemanly; never raising his voice, even if he intends on killing you! Another fascinating aspect of the book was the author showing how greed, boredom, temptation, and lust (mixed with a little bit of fear!) motivated two already professionally successful men to engage in financial mischief, and as a result, got themselves involved in something way over their heads. The Set-Up is an excellent financial thriller and I highly recommend it.

I enjoyed the many twist and turns that take you all over the world. This volume really requires the reader to pay attention. So many subplots could easily sidetrack you and make the book difficult to follow. I enjoy reading fiction that is not so transparent and predictable. The Setup took me for a loop once or twice, I'll admit it. Overall the book is a fun, fast paced read that wakes you up and makes you wonder if some of these events could actually happen.

I recently ordered this book and found it quite good. I'm hoping that Paul Erdman is in the process of writing more books. The book moves quickly, though in the beginning it gets into some financial descriptions that might put off some readers. If you are reading a financial thriller I think you should expect that kind of thing, and I think going into financial theory is an interesting part of the book.