Just finished listening to the audio book. My verdict: Excellent.
Divers discovered a WWII U-boat off the coast of New Jersey in 1991. It instantly displaced the Andrea Doria as the most dangerous dive on the East Coast (depth, current, obstructions, etc.), claiming the lives of three divers in quick succession. Nobody could tell which boat this was, and the history books were no help. Two divers became obsessed with nailing its identity and, for the next six years, put everything they had on the line to solve this mystery.
In their darkest hour, when all the leads had run dry, when their most likely theory was so outrageous that nothing but conclusive proof was needed to lay it to rest, they hatched a harebrained scheme to penetrate the diesel room of the sub (which was blocked to all but the most lunatic of divers) to look for identifying plaques. When they finally identified the sub, they had succeded in rewritting a page of WWII history.
But perhaps what I found most exquisite was the author’s use of language, with turns of phrases like: “… anyone of those conditions could have easily flicked them into the afterlife”. Flick into the afterlife? Now that’s poetry, and the book is replete with gems like this. I was digging it big time…