Shadow Divers - The True Adventure of Two Americans Who Risked Everything to Solve One of the Last Mysteries of World War II by Robert Kurson

    You just can't make this stuff up...Shadow Divers is the true adventure thriller of a band of intrepid deep wreck divers who discovered one of the last great mysteries of World War II. In the fall of 1991, only 60 miles off the coast of New Jersey, a German U-boat is discovered 230 miles beneath the frigid Atlantic Ocean. No one knew it was there and history had never recorded its sinking. Buried under decades of sediment, nearly invisible in the gloom, its devastated hulk was a haunting graveyard of twisted metal and human bones. Divers John Chatterton, Richie Kohler and others were diving legends in their own time, fearless and intrepid. But even they were unprepared for the dangers they found: treacherous currents, crushing depth, and tangled wreckage that ensnared a man and wouldn't let him go. Some divers went down to the wreck and never came back. Chatterton and Kohler would become obsessed not just with the wreck, but with the lives of the drowned U-boat's nameless crew. Shadow Divers has been optioned by Hollywood, and is currently in development with director Ridley Scott of Aliens fame, with a tentative release date of 2007. Here is what reviewers are saying about Shadow Divers:

    “An engrossing saga of the suspenseful, intriguing, and dangerous underwater investigation of a Mystery U-boat.” –
Clive Cussler

    Robert Kurson has written a genre-mixing sprint of a narrative, an adventure story that is also a genuine historical mystery...
Mark Bowden, author of Black Hawk Down

    The story told in Robert Kurson's new book features undersea thrills, a gripping mystery, incredible discoveries, true-blue friendship, life-or-death crises and history unfolding before the reader's eyes. In terms of finding the right material, writers of adventure nonfiction just don't get any luckier than this.

    Shadow Divers would work on those ingredients alone. But it also happens to be written with great you-are-there intensity and dynamic verve. '' It is one thing, wreck divers will tell you, to slither in near-total darkness through a shipwreck's twisted, broken mazes, each room a potential trap of swirling silt and collapsing structure,'' Mr. Kurson writes with typical brio. ''It is another to do so without knowing that someone did it before you and lived.''
Janet Maslin, New York Times

Synopsis by Donna Montalbano, January, 2006