(FORTUNE Magazine) – Weeks before its official publication, Connie Bruck's much anticipated book on Drexel Burnham Lambert, the sharp-elbowed Wall Street investment bank, was fast generating the sort of notoriety usually associated with its subject. In May the Wall Street Journal devoted a front-page story to the brickbats and curses flying between Drexel and Bruck, who started out as friends. Just the stuff to set book sales soaring and get book promoters promoted. Unfortunately, readers may find that controversy more fascinating than Bruck's book, The Predators' Ball: The Junk-Bond Raiders and the Man Who Staked Them (The American Lawyer/Simon & Schuster, $19.95). The trouble is not that this is a bad book -- it is in many ways good -- but that it seems small and pinched and ordinary next to ''the man'' of its subtitle, Michael Milken, the secretive, obsessive creator of Drexel's much vilified junk-bond business. He is often likened to J. P. Morgan, and with reason. Like it or not, Milken is arguably the most influential financier of the postwar era. Starting as a ferociously competitive salesman with a headful of ideas under an ill-fitting toupee, Milken built from next to nothing a $200 billion market for the high-risk, high-yield corporate securities known as junk bonds. These bonds have helped finance the contests for corporate control that have so dramatically rearranged American business. If Milken, a self-made billionaire according to Bruck, now seems past the apex of his power, his influence lives on, not least in the Wall Street craze for merchant-banking deals even riskier than the ones he pioneered. In his $ ruthless, monomaniacal devotion to the dollar, Milken is the living emblem of our selfish and troubled age. Whether one views him as demon or messiah, he is a great man. He deserves a great book, and The Predators' Ball isn't it. The controversy surrounding Bruck's effort stems mainly from her willingness to suggest that Milken and Drexel may be guilty of crimes, before either has been officially accused of any. Bruck includes a description of Drexel as ''the brass-knuckles, threatening, market-manipulating Cosa Nostra of the securities world,'' and to this reader that comes across as her own view of the firm. These are strong words. According to the Journal's story, Drexel finds them objectionable (having aired its complaints to the paper, Drexel is no longer willing to discuss them). Drexel's displeasure is understandable, especially in the context of the widely publicized federal investigations of Drexel and Milken that have been under way for nearly two years. The investigations reportedly stem from accusations by Ivan Boesky, the cadaverous arbitrager who confessed to insider trading in 1986, just a few months after Milken had raised $660 million for him. Bruck is surely not the only reporter familiar with Drexel to believe that the firm and one or more of its employees may have committed crimes. As anyone who has spent time with them knows, the folks at Drexel are not a bunch of choirboys. But on the question of what Drexel has or has not done wrong, she is working with basically the same information as other writers; she just tries to make more of it. A Drexel spokesman says the firm is unaware of wrongdoing by any of its employees. Drexel claimed the book contains hundreds of factual errors, which led Bruck to erroneous conclusions. Among the many points Drexel disputed are Bruck's charges that the firm procured prostitutes for its clients (a familiar story) and that Milken personally offered to pay Bruck for not publishing the book. Fred Joseph, Drexel's usually engaging chief executive, accused Bruck of breaching an agreement to let him correct errors in the book prior to publication or to include his rebuttal. Bruck counters that Joseph, who read the book, failed to respond in time. Drexel suggested it was considering a lawsuit. A Drexel suit against her could be a godsend not only to booksellers but to all the frustrated reporters (Bruck and the present writer included) who have failed to penetrate Drexel's innermost workings despite considerable effort and some cooperation from the firm. Precisely because a lawsuit could expose hitherto secret Drexel records to the probing of discovery proceedings, however, such litigation seems highly unlikely no matter how wrong Drexel believes Bruck to be. And so the controversy may soon pass out of memory, leaving us only with the book. DESPITE ITS FLAWS, The Predators' Ball presents a competent overview of Drexel's business -- no small achievement, given the complexity and secretiveness of the junk-bond trade. But the book suffers greatly from Bruck's inability to keep up with the rush of news about Drexel. She set out in 1985 to write about Drexel's amazing power in the marketplace, a prescient idea at the time. But it was superseded by events: Once Boesky unleashed the feds on Drexel, the amazing-power story became an anachronism. Yet most of this book is devoted to a numbingly detailed description of Drexel and its cronies doing business in years past. The book's symbolic centerpiece is the 1986 Drexel High Yield Bond Conference, the convocation of junk-bond buyers and issuers whose wry nickname gives The Predators' Ball its title. Bruck's focus on that event, which took place eight months before Boesky's public confession, dates the book. Her hasty analysis of recent events seems tacked on and depends heavily on the Pulitzer Prize-winning reporting of the Journal's James B. Stewart and Daniel Hertzberg. Bruck largely succeeds in her attempt to show how Carl Icahn, Ronald Perelman, and other junk-bond raiders operated in cozy symbiosis with Milken. Following and enlarging a well-worn reportorial path, Bruck argues that Milken was able to enrich -- and thus, to a degree, to subjugate -- both buyers and issuers of these securities. To anyone who has followed the reportage about Drexel in the business press, the gist of this is nothing new, although Bruck frequently adds enriching detail. Factually, The Predators' Ball is a pastiche of Bruck's often excellent but rarely groundbreaking reporting and the work of other journalists, whom she conscientiously credits. Even the familiar facts are often amazing, and Bruck has an especially fine ear for quotes. As painted by Bruck, Milken is a grown-up nebbish with too much power and a scary need to control others. In one of her Milken quotes he sounds like a jackal: ''Often what's old is weak, and what's new is strong.'' Perelman, the stubby, cigar-smoking raider who won Revlon, is Bruck's most vivid character. Almost with pity, she describes him as ''a mix of impatience, vulgarity, and boiling temper.'' Bruck highlights the conflicts of interest and other ethical challenges inherent in the way Milken ran his Beverly Hills-based business. A vicious competitor, he allegedly overstepped the limits at least of propriety many times. For example, Bruck charges (and Drexel denied) that Milken used a threatened takeover by Drexel-backed raider Saul Steinberg to coerce Wickes, a lumber retailer, into dropping Salomon Brothers as its investment banker in favor of Drexel. Connoisseurs of Drexeliana will appreciate such new information as Bruck provides. One juicy bit is the tale of Guy Dove III. He joined Drexel after signing an SEC consent decree on accusations of insider trading (he neither admitted nor denied wrongdoing) and ended up as chief investment officer of Atlantic Capital, which Bruck portrays as one of Milken's best and most mysterious customers. Another is Bruck's fascinating description of a 1984-85 SEC investigation of Milken, who was suspected of using inside information to trade Caesars World bonds for his own account. Milken denied doing anything wrong -- although in his deposition, as Bruck recounts, he did suffer astonishing lapses of memory -- and the SEC dropped the investigation. Bruck also dishes out plenty of sex. The hookers, allegedly offered to the senior predators at the High Yield Bond Conference, first appear five pages into the prologue; later on in the book they are joined at a Drexel party by TWA stewardesses who had come to picket Carl Icahn. (He missed the party but got the airline.) Bruck notes that Victor Posner, 69, the former chief executive of Sharon Steel who was convicted of tax evasion, ''preferred girls in their teens.'' (A Posner employee insisted to FORTUNE that this was ''absolutely incorrect,'' adding that Posner's girlfriend is in her 20s.) The writer also quotes, secondhand, the Drexel consultant she describes as the firm's alleged procurer of prostitutes: ''I understand CEOs. CEOs don't care about money, power, or fame. They have all that. What they want . . . I'm going to make sure they get.'' WERE IT JUST the raunchy exploitation of Drexel that such material suggests, The Predators' Ball would be required summertime reading. Sad to say, Bruck's intentions are considerably more serious than that, and her prose style isn't up to the job. She writes: ''The loans for $12 million to NPM (Peltz and May) & from Manufacturers Hanover and Bankers Trust had been conditioned on their being reduced by $3 million ($1.5 million to each bank) in a short period of time.'' Huh? A writer for the American Lawyer, Bruck seems uncomfortable with descriptions of finance, often piling on the detail instead of making a point. Ultimately this may be the book's greatest flaw. Milken's business is a web of interrelated transactions so complex that only a masterful writer could lead a reader through it without confusion. Bruck just empties the contents of her bulging notepads, goading the reader into feats of concentration to make sense of it all. Anyone looking for a sexy summer read might do better with Jackie Collins, and hope that someone else will produce a great book about Drexel.

BOX: ''He was, after all, the teenager who slept only three or four hours a night . . . who in L.A. and Berkeley in the Sixties not only never smoked or drank or experimented with drugs but did not even drink carbonated beverages.''