A new book on media magnate Conrad Black and his wife Barbara Amiel Black uses salacious detail to paint the embattled couple as falling prey to their own greed.

"To see such a person then destroyed by his own hubris is always tantalizing and always an amusing spectacle," Tom Bower, the British author of Conrad and Lady Black: Dancing on the Edge,  said on Monday.

Black has countered that  the new book is "a malodorous pot-boiler," adding, "His key-hole, smut-mongering side-piece portrayal of my wife as a man-eating sex maniac prior to her marriage to me is disgusting."

In the Sunday Times, Black wrote: "Almost every factual assertion ... in Tom Bower's malicious novel about my wife and me is false (and many are defamatory), except for the quotation from my e-mails to him, predicting that he would write a libellous onslaught, and declining his repeated, fawning pleas for an interview."

The book, released on both sides of the Atlantic, charts the rise and fall of the one-time power couple. Excerpts of the unauthorized biography were published two weeks ago and the book hit stores Monday.

The pinnacle of the Black's social rise came when Black -- then proprietor of the Daily Telegraph newspaper, among many others -- was appointed a peer of the British Crown. That entitled him to sit in the British House of Lords.

But in order to take his title -- Lord Black of Crossharbour -- he was forced to abandon his Canadian citizenship in 2001.

While Black built one of the world's fastest-growing newspaper companies throughout the 1990s, according to Bower, he and Lady Black adopted an even more ostentatious lifestyle.

Bower writes about the 17 butlers, the mansions on two continents, a condo in New York, luxuriously appointed jets and the small fortunes the Blacks dropped on entertaining their famous friends.

The author reserves harsh words for Barbara Amiel Black, a prominent journalist in her own right and Black's second wife.

Bower claims in the book that she married her way to the top, yet wanted more.

He writes that staff at the Blacks' mansion in London used to joke about landing lights on the roof for Madame and her broom. The Blacks have had to sell that mansion.

"I have an extravagance that knows no bounds," Amiel Black said in a 2002 interview with Vogue. She later explained that she intended the remark to be self-deprecating.

"I blame the two of them for outrageous greed, wanting much more than they could afford, and that's what brought them down," Bower said.

At the height of his business power in 1998, Black founded a new newspaper. Some critics saw the National Post as a vanity project rather than a sound business decision.

By 2000, Hollinger International's business fortunes were on the downturn, the book claims.

By late 2003, Black agreed to step down as CEO of Hollinger International, the company that operated his newspapers.

Lawsuits and investigations followed, and prosecutors in Chicago -- where Black based his U.S. headquarters -- made their moves.

In September 2005, David Radler -- Black's right-hand man from the beginning -- pleaded guilty to one count of mail fraud and was sentenced to 29 months in jail and fined US$250,000.

On Nov. 17, 2005, the U.S. Attorney's Office charged Black and others with scheming to divert more than US$80 million from Hollinger International.

Black has always maintained his innocence and has proclaimed that he will be vindicated when his case comes to trial.

"Everybody who knows me knows there's not a jot of truth to the accusations," Black said recently.

Black has said he will launch one of the largest libel suits in Canadian history, once he is cleared. His criminal trial starts in Chicago in March 2007.