Narrative non-fiction that I was reluctant to try given my lack of enthusiasm for history and anything remotely tangential to pirate stories (this wasn’t that). A Lubbe recommendation. It turned out to be an easy read and the author did a fantastic job of stitching together journal entries and other artifacts to tell a fascinating account of a British military voyage in the 1740s that went wrong. Grann was upfront in the story he was going to tell — a shipwreck would be followed eventually by two castaway parties that make their way back separately to England. The highly anticipated third act was to be a military trial where the castaway parties were to argue their sides of the shipwreck story, who acted properly and who violated protocols. The trial occurred, but with little drama, so the third act sapped a lot of energy from a mostly engaging tale.