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Tomalin and Hall's investigation runs to 285 pages (not counting a pair of appendices). Yet the book leaves a number of questions unanswered, and that testifies to the honesty with which the authors faced the difficulty of assessing Crowhurst's character and predicament. He was a liar and a fraud at times, as well as a man sometimes given to self-dramatization. But he was also at times ruthlessly, brilliantly objective. No one will ever know for sure whether poor Crowhurst was right or wrong when he decided that he could neither weather the Horn nor carry his fraud to a successful conclusion. · Peter Swerdloff