For all Kurson's terrific narrative skill in Shadow Divers--his deft braiding of story lines, his able portraiture, the easy faculty with which he crams astounding amounts of maritime and military and scientific information into his mystery story--what lifts this admirable book to the top shelf of the true-adventure genre.., is the generosity of imagination and diligence of research that bring the German sailors to life.

In the fall of 1991, in the frigid Atlantic waters sixty miles off the coast of New Jersey, weekend scuba divers John Chatterton and Richie Kohler made a startling discovery under decades of accumulated sediment: a World War II German U-boat, its interior a maze of twisted metal and human bones. Equally astonishing: All the official records agreed that there simply could not be a sunken U-boat at that location.Over the next six years, an elite team of divers embarked on a quest to solve the mystery. Some of them would not live to see its end. Chatterton and Kohler, at first bitter rivals, were drawn into a deep bond of friendship. As the men's marriages frayed under the pressure of a shared obsession, their dives grew more daring, and each realized that he was hunting for more than the identities of a lost U-boat and its nameless crew.