Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin

NATIONAL BESTSELLER Edgar Award Nominee One of the Best Books of the Year: "O, The Oprah Magazine," "Time," "The Washington Post," "The Christian Science Monitor," " St. Louis Post-Dispatch," "San Francisco Chronicle " With a New Afterword On April 4, 1968, James Earl Ray shot Martin Luther King at the Lorraine Motel. The nation was shocked, enraged, and saddened. As chaos erupted across the country and mourners gathered at King's funeral, investigators launched a sixty-five day search for King's assassin that would lead them across two continents. With a blistering, cross-cutting narrative that draws on a wealth of dramatic unpublished documents, Hampton Sides, bestselling author of "Ghost Soldiers, " delivers a non-fiction thriller in the tradition of William Manchester's "The Death of a President" and Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood. "With "Hellhound On His Trail, "Sides shines a light on the largest manhunt in American history and brings it to life for all to see. "From the Trade Paperback edition."

Review :
"Enlightening . . . a valuable contribution to the historical record [and] a memorable and persuasive portrait . . . Ray's desire to achieve something in life, Sides convincingly and originally argues, was first and foremost what sent him on his deadly trail to Memphis." --"The Washington Post " "[Sides] has pieced together a viscerally dramatic account....Sides writes in forceful, dignified, obscenity-free language and creates the momentum of a tightly constructed nonfiction film....Both Dr. King and Ray come to life in these remarkable pages, generating great suspense....spellbinding....[A ]bold, dynamic, unusually vivid book"--"New York Times " "Searing...Skillfully lifts the obscure details of the assassination out of the realm of historical elegy and translates them into a complex crime mystery that shifts the focus from Dr. King to his killer. Sides's reconstruction of the assassination itself is searing - and a reminder of how little we know about it. Relying on FBI recordes, memoirs and past historians' accounts, Sides re-creates Ray's journey from his prison escape in April 1967 to the moment when he fired the single shot that felled Dr. King. After the shot is fired, Ray takes flight and, like an extended episode of the old television show "Dragnet," thousands of agents begin their search. Sides's treatment of the killing is gripping." -- "Wall Street Journal ""Extraordinary....remarkable journalism.....compulsively readable"--San Francisco Chronicle Remarkable....The book is a window on the passions and contradictions of an era - the hatred stirred by the civil rights movements, the battle lines within a single presidential administration, and a martyr who died just as his own flame seemed to be flickering amid dissension and disappointment.....Thanks to the skills of historian and author Hampton Sides, readers will feel as if they are standing on the ledge at the Lorraine Motel with King....moving....a page-turner...