There’s always been an unspoken rule about Wall Street thrillers: brand matters.

In this genre, an office visitor never simply takes a drink of water; he sips Sanfaustino. A trader doesn’t get nervous when his picks aren’t hitting; he begins fiddling with his Hermes tie. Bankers aren’t well dressed; they are “suited in the battle rattle of Armani pinstripes and Gucci loafers.”

But in the age of Bernard Madoff and the Galleon Group, when “expert networks” and “front-runners” are becoming household terms, it’s no longer enough to get the product placement right. The financial details are important, too. Three recent thrillers — all set in the seedy underbelly of the finance world and written by former financiers — are bringing Wall Street minutiae to Main Street masses.

“Bull Street” (Brindle Publishing) was written by David Lender, a 25-year finance veteran with Wall Street bona fides and a flair for zippy narrative. The novel follows Richard Blum, a young associate at an investment firm, through his first months on the job. Through no fault of his own, the financier is ensnared in an insider trading ring and must spend the rest of the novel evading both the Securities and Exchange Commission and rogues inside his firm. With plenty of gunshots and chase scenes to ratchet up the suspense, it’s Michael Lewis meets Michael Bay.

Lender, a former managing director at Bank of America, does an admirable job of replicating the rapid-fire dialogue common to the deal-making world. In one scene, Blum’s boss, the investing kingpin Harold Milner, discusses a potential buyout deal with his banker:

“‘So, guys,’ Milner said, ‘I can do the permanent financing once I take control. The real catch is, I need the front money to finance the tender offer to buy the company until I can put my permanent financing in place.’

‘We figure you’ll need about $6 billion, including refinancing their existing debt,’ Steinberg said.

‘Right,’ Milner said. ‘So where do I get that kind of money in the middle of the worst credit crunch any of us has ever seen?’

‘Our partner GCG has a big balance sheet,’ Steinberg said.

‘I’m all ears,’ Milner said.”

By contrast, H.T. Narea’s entry in the financial thriller genre, “The Fund” (Minotaur Books), contains more geopolitical villainy than boardroom jousting. The book features Kate Molares, a laid-off Bear Stearns trader turned government intelligence expert who uses her financial expertise to track down a network of criminal moneymen. Narea, a former managing director and principal at JPMorgan Chase, has given his readers a sprawling book with bailout-size stakes: bomb plots, biological terrorism and attacks on the Federal Reserve of the literal, rather than the Ron Paul, variety.

Norb Vonnegut’s “The Gods of Greenwich” (Forge Books) is set in the consumption capital of Connecticut. The book follows a down-and-out hedge fund veteran who lands at Leeser Capital, a shady fund run by a man “who made Enron’s execs look like saints.” Vonnegut’s novel rings the truest of the three and is certainly the biggest name-dropper, with Amaranth Advisors, Long-Term Capital Management, AQR, Tudor, Bridgewater Associates and other members of the hedge fund pantheon making cameos.

All three thrillers carry standard disclaimers about the fictionalization of the events they describe. But finance-minded readers looking for real-life analogues will find plenty of roman a clef details for the gossip mill. “The Fund” traces a near replica of the 2008 collapse of Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, complete with a Treasury secretary who badgers bank executives into carrying out “shotgun weddings for failing institutions.” In “Bull Street,” federal agents threaten to investigate Richard Blum’s father’s insurance business, an echo of the strategies used in the investigations of Michael Milken, the junk-bond mogul who pleaded guilty to securities fraud in 1990, and his brother, Lowell.

The traits of Steven A. Cohen, the founder of the hedge fund giant SAC Capital, seem to be especially well suited to fiction.

In “The Fund,” a money manager is described as the owner of a Damian Hirst-designed airplane called “Gold Shark Swimming in Air.” It’s a hammer-over-head reference to an actual shark-themed Hirst piece, “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living,” which is owned by Cohen. Cy Leeser, the crooked hedge fund manager in “The Gods of Greenwich,” is described as an avid art collector who keeps his trading floor cooled to 66 degrees, reminiscent of SAC Capital’s 69-degree trading floor. An SAC spokesman declined to comment.

Vonnegut, a former private wealth manager for Morgan Stanley, contends that his experience managing money for the super-rich was a “soap opera” that gave him “enough material to last 50 years.” Lender said that he had consciously based his novel’s insider-trading plot on the real-life travails of Milken and Ivan Boesky, the central figures in the 1980s insider trading ring.

“I was cutting my teeth on the Street when those scandals happened,” Lender said. “What happened in that era very heavily influenced what I wrote about.”

Most of the wealth-gawking details in these books are spot on, with only a few missteps. (Memo to Vonnegut: Not even the most zealous real estate broker calls the Meatpacking District “MePa.”) But they also lend the books an air of predictability, as the smoothest operators almost always meet ignoble ends. A pair of Ferragamo loafers, in particular, seems to be the Chekhov’s gun of financial thrillers — wear those in Chapter 1, and you’re doing 20 to life by the epilogue.

It’s true that setting a novel in a world of extravagance and glitz lowers the bar for pathos considerably. These are novels in which a sentence like “Cusack parked his beat-up BMW next to a glacier-white Bentley convertible” qualifies as Dickensian suffering.

But there is real harm done here, especially of the financial variety. Banks go under. Oil breaks $115 a barrel. And the Chinese government is called in to save the U.S. from economic implosion.

In fact, the true suspense in these books often ends up being the threat of macroeconomic disaster rather than greed, betrayal and espionage.