Alex Cabe reviewed The Wager by David Grann
Well Written, But Fizzles at the End
3 stars
Very well written and, after a somewhat slow start, gets the reader very interested in the personalities and story. Cheap, Bulkeley, and Byron were all well drawn and distinct.
I enjoyed the novelistic history format and the tighter focus compared to Killers of the Flower Moon, and I was thinking four stars right up until the last fifth or so. The trial is a fizzling anticlimax. I get that it's a history book and Grann can't change what happened, but he chose the subject and the structure of the book. The trial felt like a let down after all the buildup of the shipwreck and the conflicting accounts.