HealthSouth Corp. (NYSE: HLS) was one of those one-in-a-lifetime stocks. Once a highflier trading on the New York Stock Exchange, it descended to the Pink Sheets in the midst of a wave of accounting and management scandals. Federal agents raided the company's headquarters, and a stock that had traded in the 20's not so long ago sank below a dime.

Then just as quickly as it had collapsed, the stock bounced back. Some investors had turned $5 thousand investments into over a million as the company avoided bankruptcy and made a rebound.

In a world where major accounting scandals, SEC charges, and federal raids are a usually a sign of the end, HealthSouth's new management team led the company to an incredible recovery.

Dr. William Cast is a doctor who had worked for a clinic that was acquired by the company, and later became an investor who followed the stock through a Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ: YHOO) message board. Going South: An Inside Look at Corruption and Greed, and the Power of the HealthSouth Message Board is the product of that experience. While the financial media was declaring the stock good as dead, Yahoo! posters analyzed the company's prospects and decided it would be able to pull through. Cast and others backed up the truck and became some of the very, very few investors to achieve an early retirement by investing in a Pink Sheets stock under FBI investigation.

Health South is an exception of course, and scandal-ridden companies should probably be avoided like the plague by most investors. But this book is a pretty exciting tale of the power the internet can, but rarely does, have in allowing investors to share due diligence.