Mark Cowan is a journalist with over two decades' experience in newspapers and television. He spent twelve years as a crime correspondent for tabloid, broadsheet and Sunday titles in Birmingham, and was embedded with the British Army in war-torn Kosovo. Cowan has also worked on crime documentaries for the BBC and ITV, and is a technical and cave diver. To bring Martin Robson's dramatic story to the page, Cowan has drawn on hundreds of documents and dozens of interviews collected over five years of reporting, combined with unprecedented access to the people involved in this true life-or-death thriller.
Martin Robson is one of the world’s leading instructors on technical, cave and rebreather diving. A former Royal Marine Commando, he has been cave diving for more than twenty years, leading explorations and tours of systems in Europe and North America. In 2003, he discovered a new passageway in the Durzon cave, France, more than a mile into the cave and one hundred metres underwater. Only a handful of people have ventured there since.
