The Donald Crowhurst story simultaneously quite mundane (a man who after being forced into a tough situation, starts cheating) and incredibly fantastic (just how elaborate the scheme turns out to be, some of the downright strange coincidences that forced the final outcome). The effort and research that went into reconstructing Crowhurt's voyage based on misleading radio messages and a combination of partially complete and doctored ship logs is amazing. The book is not only thorough, but also very objective — Crowhurst's ultimate fate can't be known with perfect certainty, but the authors establish what they think is the most reasonable conclusion and exhaustively list the supporting evidence for it. Other possibilities are considered as well, with each one dismissed with sound reasoning. The one negative I'll say is that the book might be a little _too_ thorough — I found myself wishing that they'd packed the story into half the length or so.