Tom Bower’s “Outrageous Fortune” has a different title in Britain. There, the corporate finaglings of Conrad Black, the Canadian-born newspaper tycoon who controlled The Chicago Sun-Times, The Jerusalem Post and The Daily Telegraph in London (not to mention The Journal of the San Juan Islands and The Skagit Valley Argus) are better known. Lord Black has achieved household notoriety. So the British version is more lip-smackingly familiar. It is called “Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge.”

Far better than either of these titles would have been “Schadenfreude” — not only because it aptly summarizes the drooling glee prompted by the Blacks’ comedown, but also because of Lord Black’s well-documented fondness for showily eloquent words. In describing the first of his several school expulsions, this one for selling final exams to fellow students at a Toronto private school when he was 14, he called the principal’s wife a “desiccated old sorceress” and the principal an “insufferable poltroon.”

He would go on to better invective and far worse transgressions. “Outrageous Fortune” is a hastily disgorged, shapeless account of Lord Black’s apparent shell-game approach to corporate management and surreptitious fee extraction. These techniques have culminated in disgrace, eight counts of fraud and an American trial scheduled to begin in Chicago next year. Throughout his comedown, Lord Black has adhered to the time-honored technique of loudly proclaiming his innocence despite spectacular evidence to the contrary.

As a business book, “Outrageous Fortune” is convoluted but sketchy. Mr. Bower does a better job of providing an overview (“no other public company would have found itself in the absurd position of its chairman taking money from the company and then lending the same money back through his own private company”) than of offering specific information. He favors generalities and neglects to cite sources for much of the material here. The blanket claim that he has drawn on earlier biographical and autobiographical books about Lord Black does not justify such oversights.

While Mr. Bower leaves little doubt about the degree to which Black-controlled companies, including Hollinger International, Hollinger Inc. and Ravelston, were manipulated to serve one another’s interests, his details lack precision. And these matters call for an accountant’s skills as much as a muckraker’s. But the book’s assertion that in the year 2000 alone Black associates extracted $122 million from a company with a net income of $117 million is supported by investigatory evidence uncovered by a hard-charging analyst from the investment fund Tweedy Browne. And its implications regarding the Blacks’ cupidity are nothing if not clear.

“Outrageous Fortune” seeks to mix tales of fiscal chicanery with its own brand of money-mongering, in a tone that weakly mimics the fawning of glossy magazines. About the Palm Beach set that the Blacks were eager to infiltrate, Mr. Bower writes: “Their mansions were imposing, their manicured lawns dazzling and their undisguised wealth awesome.”

But this book shows precious little flair for the kind of potboiling prose on which whole shameless writing careers are based. Its descriptions of the high life are unintentionally hilarious. (“Gladly he satisfied her craving for cashmere sweaters, her enjoyment of expensive trips and, at the weekends, her desire to smoke pot and win at Monopoly.”)

Ditto Mr. Bower’s clumsy malice about Lady Black’s stilettos. “On the day Conrad Black and Barbara Amiel secretly agreed to marry,” he writes, “she celebrated at Manolo Blahnik by choosing pairs of the world’s most expensive shoes, as usual with high heels to minimize her big feet.”

Clearly Ms. Amiel is meant to be this flat-footed book’s secret weapon. Though it concentrates primarily on financial scheming, it counts on the Black-Amiel union to provide glamour. The couple cattily known as Mr. Money and Attila the Honey are described in the full flower of wretched excess, and this part of the book is given the predictable “Macbeth” spin. Since Mr. Bower regards Tom Wolfe as an earnest chronicler of the lives of rich socialites, his own denseness about these people is guaranteed.

Ms. Amiel, once the author of an article called “Why Women Marry Up” and later an outspoken right-wing pundit employed by her husband’s publications, is said to have made declarations like, “I’m never going to a public cinema again” and to have demanded ever-larger private airplanes. She is said to have once been mortified by her husband’s saying, “We’ve got to check in” — a clear reference to public air travel — in front of rich friends.

Harp as he does upon Ms. Amiel’s sexual wiles and heavy expenditures, Mr. Bower can’t hang a whole book on her extravagance. Nor does Lord Black’s ambition rivet interest, although it cannot have been easy to make the Blacks sound dull.

But Mr. Bower’s insights into human nature are primitive. (He says that Lord Black, then Mr. Black, married his first wife, a secretary, “to satisfy his need for companionship.”) His phrasing is unfortunate. (“Like cosmetics applied every morning, she relied on her chosen man’s image to project herself.”) And his editor is missing in action. (“Her itinerant search for permanence was doomed.”) Think what you will of Lord Black, but he writes better than his biographer does.

In its hunt for irony “Outrageous Fortune” finds some in the fact that Lord Black will soon be judged by a jury of commoners, those same little people over whom he sought to tower. Here’s more: this book, like several other recent ones published by HarperCollins, makes a sad little sound. When its binding is snapped open, it literally squeaks. That hardly suits a subject whose preferred sound is the self-righteous roar.

Copyright 2006 The New York Times Company