In a testosterone-filled "new, new economy" company known for executives in racecars and deals done in topless bars, Sherron Watkins had to fight hard to fit in.

The former Enron Corp. vice president was blond but not a bubbly blond - the kind of blonde who got ahead at Enron. She didn't have Ivy League credentials, nor did she put on airs. She was a practical, middle-aged woman at the Houston company that focused more on style than on substance.

Eventually, she wasn't sure she wanted to fit in at Enron, the company that came to symbolize the greed and corruption that ran amok among some U.S. corporations in the late 1990s.

Watkins became known to the world as "the Enron whistle-blower" after she wrote a memo to Enron Chief Executive Ken Lay in 2001 warning of her fear that the company would "implode in a wave of accounting scandals."

Her prophetic memo made her one of three women honored by Time magazine as persons of the year for 2002.

Her story, which provides a frank, behind-the-scenes look at Enron, is told in the latest of several books written about the morally and financially bankrupt Houston corporation. Author Mimi Swartz's Power Failure: The Inside Story of the Collapse of Enron, however, captures something most previous books haven't: the female perspective.

Swartz is executive editor of Texas Monthly, has been a staff writer for The New Yorker and Talk and has written for The New York Times, Vanity Fair and Esquire.

After reading Swartz's book, one might surmise that the dearth of female executives at Enron may have contributed to its downfall. Foulmouthed energy traders in khakis and golf shirts could do no wrong in the eyes of the top executives at Enron, while a pragmatic female accountant who questioned the company's Byzantine accounting methods feared for her job.

Enron's top female executive, Rebecca Mark, was quickly targeted for annihilation by the now-infamous Jeffrey Skilling, the former chief operating officer credited with lifting Enron to stratospheric highs and, eventually, hellish lows.

Skilling "drew Mark into a bitter battle of accountants," Swartz writes. "Skilling would claim a deal (of Mark's) was a money loser; Mark would say she recouped Enron's investment and then some."

After enduring several "traps" set by Skilling to ensure her failure, Mark eventually acquiesced, leaving the company in August 2000 and selling her Enron stock, worth about $80 million. Despite being pushed out by her egomaniacal competitor, Mark was one of the lucky ones to get out before the implosion.

The book also provides stunning examples of how low Enron had sunk by the late 1990s. In 1999, those much-admired Enron energy traders were wheeling and dealing in power-strapped California, making obscene profits for their employer.

In May of that year, one trader, Timothy Belden, sent a huge amount of electricity over old transmission lines in California - 2,900 megawatts over a 15-megawatt path.

When questioned by a power-system operator as to why he did something so ridiculous, Belden responded: "Um, there's a - there - we just um, - we did it because we wanted to do it. And I don't - I don't mean to be coy."

Belden jammed the lines with enough electricity to cause congestion in the power grid, which drove up electricity prices 70 percent that afternoon. Enron made $10 million that day, while Californians overpaid about $5 million for their electricity.

State regulators slapped Enron with a $25,000 fine for Belden's misdeed, a pittance compared with the company's $10 million profit.

The sham electricity trading pales in comparison with the off-balance-sheet antics of Enron Chief Financial Officer Andy Fastow, who successfully "hid" hundreds of millions of dollars in Enron debt in the late 1990s.

Try as she might to make Fastow's "creative accounting" understandable, Swartz bogs the story down at times with in-depth descriptions of Fastow's multiple, eerily named off-balance-sheet entities such as Raptor and Condor.

But she provides enough human drama to keep even mathematically challenged readers (such as myself) interested in Watkins' version of Enron's demise.

Because Swartz wrote the book with Watkins' help, Enron's famous whistle-blower comes off as a hero, even though the book reveals that Watkins privately had her suspicions about Enron's financial situation at least two years before she wrote her memo to Lay.

"By the late 1990s, there were others inside Enron who, like Sherron Watkins, were ambivalent about the company, people who might have seen or heard about things that seemed strange, or silly, or improper," Swartz writes. "But, like Sherron, they were also aware of the benefits and the prestige of working at a hot company that was not only famous for innovation - Fortune, Business Week and The Wall Street Journal all said so - but that paid well. Why focus on the negatives?"

It wasn't until Skilling resigned in 2001 after only six months as CEO and Enron was well on its way to certain demise that Watkins voiced her concerns to Lay.

But aside from paying perhaps too much homage to Watkins, Swartz tells the story in an evenhanded fashion. She airs Enron's dirty laundry much like a good fiction writer, providing more insights into Enron's main characters than earlier Enron books.

But be forewarned: You may have the urge to take a shower after you read Power Failure because Enron was one filthy company.

Heather Draper is a business reporter for the Rocky Mountain News.

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