Within hours of the death of Princess Diana, conspiracy theories began to fly thickly across the Internet. Within 10 days, a book called Who Killed Diana? was on the bookshelves in Cairo, claiming that the princess and her boyfriend Dodi Fayed were assassinated by the British government to ensure that neither Diana, her sons, nor any future children would convert to Islam. In our conspiracy-obsessed age, such a scenario seems as likely as any other currently making the rounds, be it the faked deaths of Elvis and Jim Morrison or aliens stockpiled in a government warehouse, but as authors Thomas Sancton (the Time magazine Paris bureau chief) and Scott MacLeod (the magazine's Middle East correspondent) point out in exhaustive detail, the fatal car accident was almost undoubtedly the result of poor judgment, coincidence, and plain bad luck.
The pair conducted interviews with such key figures as Dodi's father, Mohammed, and several of the paparazzi who were first on the scene, and they give a detailed account of the events leading up to the accident, as well as profiles of all the participants, most extensively the driver Henri Paul and the princess's Egyptian boyfriend. Unlike the popular image of a macho cocaine-snorting party guy, Dodi is revealed to have been a sweet and rather insecure figure whose enormous generosity was often taken advantage of. With much personal charisma but little aside from wealth and privilege to mark him as extraordinary, he seems to have been a natural match for his stellar consort. --John Longenbaugh
Entertainment Weekly, Lisa Schwarzbaum
Sancton and MacLeod ... cover a lot of familiar ground. But they also serve as textbook models of methodical reporting--the kind I would hope for but not always count on, in the Drudge Age, from a newsmagazine.... the reporters stack their hard-won facts into neat bundles of evidence.
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