by Robert Roderick
A new category of popular novel has been creeping up on us. The hero of this new genre is not a spy or an adventurer. He is a businessman. Paul Erdman tapped this field with The Crash of 79 and The Silver Bears, and last year Michael M. Thomas' Green Monday made the best-seller list. Roderick, a financial consultant, centers his book on a handsome Swiss banker. In 1965 he decides a war in the Middle East will create an oil shortage and that he can make billions if he owns a lot of tankers. A New York banker, who is a brilliant American Indian, helps him finance his fleet by raising money from a dying professor in the Midwest and some underworld hoods. The result is a mixed-up, overplotted, fun-to-read, multinational extravaganza. The footnotes (how many novels have you read with footnotes?) are bits of historical information, often livelier than the story being told: "Japanese Americans relocated during World War II suffered estimated property losses of $40 million. They got back $4 million." For those who find big bucks sexy, this is the summer's best turn-on. (Wyndham, $15.95)
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