The publicity materials pertaining to Journal of the Dead: A Story of Friendship and Murder in the New Mexico Desert promise that readers will be reminded of Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild. It's a fair comparison. Both stories are true, both are about greenhorns going into country that exceeded their abilities to survive in it and both are tragic.

Journal of the Dead tells the story of Easterners Raffi Kodikian and David Coughlin. In the summer of 1999, the two young men decided to turn Coughlin's enrollment in a West Coast college into a Kerouac-esque odyssey. (The vagabonds even planned their trip to include Kerouac's favorite highway, Route 66, "a molted snakeskin a thousand miles long.")

Everything went well for Raffi and David until they decided to camp overnight in Carlsbad Caverns National Park. Although they planned to stay just one night, the two became lost trying to find their way out of a canyon. Four days later, when park officials found them, Coughlin was dead, stabbed in the chest. Kodikian told rescuers that Coughlin begged Kodikian to kill him to put him out of the misery of dehydration.

While there were many doubts about Kodikian's story, there were no doubts about the effects of dehydration. As someone reaches the more severe stages, the symptoms include deafness, hallucinations and failing vision.

"Potassium, which triggers muscle contractions, can reach such concentrated levels that bitingly painful spasms ensue. The tongue swells to twice its size and may actually turn black, while the eyes are so depleted of lubricant that blinking lids have the abrading effect of sandpaper," Kersten explains. Eventually, the body begins to draw from its own cell tissue until a major organ fails, usually the kidneys.

Woefully unprepared and under-stocked with water, Kodikian and Coughlin alternated between being canny and being foolish. Journal entries they kept showed an eerie deterioration in their condition and spirit. Finally, and according to Kodikian, Caughlin asked his friend to kill him, and Kodikian complied, saying that death was a mercy for his friend.

The authorities disagreed. A district attorney summed up the state's case against Kodikian: "You don't get to kill someone in New Mexico just because they ask you to."

Much of Kersten's story centers on how the law treated Kodikian. Kersten takes you inside the deliberations on both sides of the case. He explores notions of mercy killing and moral death. He goes into the backgrounds of Kodikian and Coughlin to make you feel as if you know both of them.

But Kersten also feels compelled to give you short histories of Carlsbad, local sheriffs and Civil War action in the area, all of which are interesting in their own right but excess baggage for the purposes of this story. It makes it seem as if there was more material here than Kersten could shoehorn into an earlier short story he wrote on the subject, but not enough material for a book.

Journal of the Dead isn't a long book, but it would have been better shortened. But that's not a major criticism of a story that is inherently interesting, and one you can't read without wondering if Kodikian is truthful or deceitful and what you would do in a similar situation.

Dan Danbom is a freelance writer living in Denver.