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    Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin
    Unavailable
    Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin
    Unavailable
    Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin
    Audiobook15 hours

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

    Published by Penguin Random House Audio

    4.5/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    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 With a blistering, cross-cutting narrative that draws on a wealth of dramatic unpublished documents, Hampton Sides, bestselling author of Ghost Soldiers, delivers a non-fiction thriller in the tradition of William Manchester's The Death of a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.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio
    Release dateApr 27, 2010
    ISBN9780739358931
    Unavailable
    Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin

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    Reviews for Hellhound on His Trail

    4.5/5

    239 ratings31 reviews

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    • 5/5
      At the time of his assassination, Martin Luther King was working on a poverty initiative. He was arranging an occupation that would draw attention to the dire conditions in which some Americans were forced to live thorough lack of wage and opportunity. King asserted that poverty and inequality was the ruination of society. That the inequality spawned resentment, anger and violence.His assassin was born of the same inter-generational, any-race poverty that King was trying to alleviate.The story of King's murderer and his journey through time and space from his jail-break to Memphis, is -inappropriately- exciting. We follow his progress to where King is, and in thriller style, we are still rooting for Martin Luther King right up to the time when he is shot. There is so much information in this book. So much feeling and so much research has gone into it. It reads so smoothly, and the information is layed down from the different perspectives turn-about to keep us up with the play with everyone concerned. We have the King himself, the FBI who were watching him closely and of course the murderer, his life and his hunting down, who's story this really is.
    • 5/5
      Hampton Sides' account of the movements of James Earl Ray leading up to and following his shooting of Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., is a portrait of Dr. King, a history of the Memphis trash collectors' strike and also the story of the FBI's surveillance of King and the manhunt for his assassin. Sides is a graceful and fluent writer who sticks to the facts so his book is both educational and enjoyable.
    • 4/5
      While this book may not be fit the preferred genre of many readers, I would have a hard time believing most readers won't appreciate what it has to say. It does cover a major American historical figure and has some interesting insight into the American civil rights movement, but it is primarily a detective thriller. The author has clean clear style that moves the story along smoothly. I have read books about many of the assassins of American presidents and other major public figures and James Earl Ray just does not fit the "normal" side of what is decidedly a very abnormal activity. You really have to read the book to appreciate how unique he was.
    • 5/5
      Fascinating account of Martin Luther King, Jr.'s last days, and of the activities of his killer, James Earl Ray, a/k/a Eric S. Galt et al., before and after the assassination until he was finally apprehended by an astute Scotland Yard detective just before he would have boarded a plane in London bound for Brussels and (he hoped) eventually Rhodesia where extradition would not have been possible. There's a lot more of interest in the book as well, and it got me thinking about how disconnected I was from the world in 1968. Although naturally I was aware of the assassination, and I remember seeing photos of Ray after he was caught and during his trial, I am amazed now to realize that I was in Washington, DC, on our Senior Class trip less than 3 weeks before the shooting in Memphis. I was probably in the National Cathedral about a week before MLK gave his final Sunday sermon there just days before he died. (I've been digging around in old scrapbooks and memory books today, and I found a ticket stub from Ford's Theater dated March 23, 1968.) There were fires and looting and race-related violence in the aftermath in Washington, not to mention, a bit later, Resurrection City in the backyard of the White House. And while that was still going on, the assassination of Robert Kennedy and his funeral. It never registered with me on a personal level until now that these things were happening in places I had so recently visited --the Mall, the White House, the National Cathedral, Arlington National Cemetery. The book is very well written, in what the author terms a "novelistic" style, without too much attribution or reference to sources in the body of the text. There is an extensive section of notes, however, and the author's references are thoroughly documented. I am now quite interested in reading more by Hampton Sides, who goes on my list of favorite non-fiction authors, along with Shelby Foote and David McCullough. March 2017
    • 5/5
      Fantastic narrative nonfiction. Impeccably researched. I couldn't stop reading, and I learned a lot too. One of the best books I have ever read in this genre. Highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      I could barely stop listening! I recommend reading this book.
    • 3/5
      Quite good history of the search for James Earl Ray. The author claims he used the techniques of a novelist without his license, as described by Shelby Foote. In a discussion of the FBI's decision to concentrate on reviewing fingerprints from convicts instead of their larger file, the author says that this reduced their work by "several orders of magnitude", but the reduction was from 53,000 to 1,900, clearly a reduction of a single order of magnitude.
    • 5/5
      Hampton Sides knows how to present history as a page-turner. Having been impressed with his book, "Blood and Thunder," I was equally so with "Hellhound on His Trail." It's the story of the assassination of Martin Luther King and the hunt for his killer, James Earl Ray. Ray is a cipher through most of the book, and even at the end, though many questions are answered, he remains a very strange man. One can't help concluding that he was probably aided and abetted at various points both pre- and post-assassination, but his accomplices were likely only similar low-lifes (his brothers are strong suspects), rather than high-level conspirators. It's hard for me to imagine anyone being disappointed in reading this book.
    • 4/5
      This is a well-written account of how elusive James Earl Ray was and the difficulty in apprehending him. In the end, it was Scotlalnd Yard that found him, with the help of the FBI.This is yet another book that stressed just how very weary Martin Luther King was and how devastated and depressed he was in watching all the internal fighting of the key members of the civll rights movement.One interesting fact I learned was that Jessie Jackson told the press that he was on the balcony, holding Martin Luther King after he was shot. This was indeed a blatant lie, as he was on the ground, most likely hiding in the bushes fearful that the sniper was still determined to kill others.
    • 5/5
      Wow!!!! I loved this book. An amazing account of a man who is what I would call a brilliant idiot. Additionally, as someone who was an infant when King was shot, it vividly depicted the era and reminded me of how bad things were in this country only a short time ago.
    • 5/5
      At the time of his assassination, Martin Luther King was working on a poverty initiative. He was arranging an occupation that would draw attention to the dire conditions in which some Americans were forced to live thorough lack of wage and opportunity. King asserted that poverty and inequality was the ruination of society. That the inequality spawned resentment, anger and violence.His assassin was born of the same inter-generational, any-race poverty that King was trying to alleviate.The story of King's murderer and his journey through time and space from his jail-break to Memphis, is -inappropriately- exciting. We follow his progress to where King is, and in thriller style, we are still rooting for Martin Luther King right up to the time when he is shot. There is so much information in this book. So much feeling and so much research has gone into it. It reads so smoothly, and the information is layed down from the different perspectives turn-about to keep us up with the play with everyone concerned. We have the King himself, the FBI who were watching him closely and of course the murderer, his life and his hunting down, who's story this really is.
    • 5/5
      Forget about spoilers. Hampton Sides has done the seemingly impossible: created a heart-pounding, electrifying account of the stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. in 1968 and the manhunt for his killer. But everyone knows the outcome. King was shot dead by James Earl Ray who was arrested several weeks later in London’s Heathrow Airport. Everybody knows that. So how exactly did Sides keep the suspense ratcheted up until the very last page? This is a true crime story like no other.I’m still fairly numb from reading this driving narrative non-fiction of a time I remember very well. Sides did a superb job of getting at the psychology of the man found guilty of killing the African-American icon. Throughout the book, James Earl Ray appears to be a cypher, a non-entity. As the narrative opens, the prisoner who escapes underneath a truckload of bread is only identified as prisoner 416-J. From then on, we only know him by the many assumed names he goes by for the next year. We never see the name James Earl Ray until close to the end of the book. By doing this I think Sides has managed to show what an insignificant being this man was, shrewd one moment and horrendously stupid the next. After escaping he wanders from Missouri through the American South to Mexico and California, with no visible means of support, before returning a year later to Alabama/Georgia and Memphis where he stalks King. Along the way, we get to not know a guy who says very little, gets to know no one and has an unending supply of funds. He manages to stay in one sleazy motel room or flophouse after another. He’s drawn to the seamy side of life but doesn’t really fit in there either, in his neat suit coat, white shirt and tie.Sides alternates this compelling narrative with descriptions of King’s frustrations with the pace of the civil rights movement and dissension within the ranks, his vitriolic disagreements with President Lyndon Johnson’s spending on the Viet Nam War while poverty runs rampant in the U.S., and J. Edgar Hoover’s surveillance of King’s activities and his visceral hatred of King. Once Ray commits the crime for which he initiated the greatest FBI manhunt in history, Sides highlights his every move, his apparent mistakes, his flight to Atlanta, Detroit, Windsor, Toronto, London, Portugal and his final apprehension by Scotland Yard at Heathrow where he is trying to board a plane for Brussels so he can eventually escape to Rhodesia, which has both apartheid and no extradition policy. At no time does the suspense let up---the driving narrative is palpable.Hampton Sides apparently does not buy any of the conspiracy theories out there but his narrative did bring up some questions. Where was Ray getting all the money he needed to survive? Someone must have been helping him. Who? How does a man shoot a high-powered rifle, that he purchased just a couple of days before King was shot, with deadly accuracy, while standing in a cramped bathtub in a rooming house? And if the FBI was keeping King under surveillance, as has been documented, where were they while King was being stalked? But this book doesn’t address those questions. It just sits in Ray’s back pocket and follows along and oh my, what a ride it is. Highly recommended.
    • 3/5
       Interesting story of MLK's killer - a bit dry and drawn out occasionally - good overall.
    • 5/5
      Everyone knows how Martin Luther King died but this book grabs and holds our interest with a mystery that remains unsolved: who was James Earl Ray and why did he do it? Hampton Sides reveals Ray to be a contradictory multifaceted figure of banal evil. Crazy, possibly conspiratorial, and a sad American archetype. Overall this was a fantastic book, cleverly structured and told with novelistic detail and pacing, Sides is a master craftsman. Recommend it highly. As an aside, Sides neglects to mention that Ray made the ultimate escape when he requested his body/ashes be buried in Ireland, home of his ancestors, because of "the way the [US] government has treated him."
    • 5/5
      A great account of James Earl Ray and what he did prior to and after the assassination of Martin Luther King. I learned a lot that I had not known about the assassination. Hampton Sides did an excellent job researching and documenting, he also does a great job of telling the story. The narrative makes the story easier to read then a regular history with just the facts.
    • 5/5
      This is the way history books should be written. It was very entertaining like a detective novel. He made all the characters human with a sneak peak into their lives as well as giving a flavour for the times they lived in. This book presents the story as if a lone gunman killed Martin Luther King Jr. and he leaves the door open to other possibilities. While he did a lot of research for this book it is good he leaves the door open for there are many others armed with facts that feel there was a conspiracy. I also liked his other audios “Blood and Thunder: The Epic Story of Kit Carson and the Conquest of the American West” and “Ghost Soldiers: The Epic Account of World War II's Greatest Rescue Mission”. Unfortunately, listened to them before I started writing audio reviews.
    • 5/5
      Excellent example of a forensic writer's work
    • 5/5
      Like others have pointed out, this book filled the serious gap in my knowledge of history, about one of the world's most important civil rights leaders. In addition, I learned a lot about the government/politicians of the time, the unrest in the United States (both racially and Vietnam War related), the genesis and effectiveness of the FBI during the search for King's assassin. Sides is simply a great writer, I will read anything the guy writes, because I learn and I'm given facts from both (or often more than two) sides of an equation, allowing me to make my own decisions on things. In some ways, he re-writes history because he finds and writes about very important facts that simply are unknown to the average U.S. citizen. I realize how bias textbook history is. I think he is one of the best, if not the best, living non fiction writer. In some ways, he reminds me (here) of Capote's In Cold Blood. Although I know going in, I'm supposed to hate James Earl Ray, there is just enough information where I just did not. On the flipside, I thought going in King would be the flawlessly revered saint he is often made out to be. Not so. He was a real man, very emotionally fragile in fact, but he had an absolute gift for preaching, and being, peace and non-violent brotherhood and love amongst all colors of human beings. The author dug very deeply in to these events and uncovered a weath of information. All of this is done in such a way that this was such an engaging read, I truly could not put the book down. My only small complaint, which Sides does so much to be annoying, is that crescendo towards the end of a chapter, then whap, he switches gears to another topic, so the reader is left at a cliff many times. It was someone toned down from Ghost Soldiers, so better, but egads, it happens a lot. But a small complaint and I recommend this book very highly to anyone caring to learn about a very important piece of American history.
    • 4/5
      Wow, great details. I knew nothing of this -- I was too young when it happened -- but this is a terrific job.
    • 3/5
      My husband enjoyed this book as a puzzle—it gives a huge amount of detail about the activities of the man whose legal name was James Earl Ray before he shot King. The question was which one of those details was going to matter to catching him. But that wasn’t enough to keep my attention through all the places Ray went and the laundry he did and the toiletries he bought, and how he swapped the first rifle he bought for the second but then had to get a box jury-rigged for him because the new rifle with the scope on it wouldn’t fit into the original box. There was also some wider context—what King was attempting with the Poor People’s Campaign, how Hoover and Johnson reacted to the assassination, and so on—but ultimately the story at the center didn’t grip me. Ray seems to have been something of a sociopathic cipher, not just to the people he met, many of whom found him unmemorable, but also to Sides, despite the dramatic assassination and escapes he carried out.
    • 4/5
      Sides reconstructed the lives of King and James Earl Ray in the months prior to King's assassination and continues to follow Ray until his arrest and return to the U.S. Sides does an admirable job of following Ray's movements both before and after the shooting. The only thing I felt was lacking from the book was an explanation of Ray's motivation, Sides touches on several possibilities however I don't think anyone other then Ray knew his real motive. Highly recommended.I received this as an ARC from th publisher.
    • 5/5
      I'd heard about the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, and James Earl Ray, for quite some time now, but no real details stuck out for me except for the fact that MLK was shot on the balcony of the Lorraine Motel. (This despite having self-proclaimed "hippies" and all-around groovy and cool dudes that taught all 4 years of high school history. They lived to talk about the 60's and 70's and would bring something from those decades into almost any topic in time. They were a fantastic group of teachers.) All I knew about James Earl Ray was that he was arrested overseas and that he died in the late 90's. That's it.No longer do I have a lack of knowledge about either subject, the period of time, police procedural policy or anything else relating to this horrific event. Spanning the ~10 years before the shot, and up until present day, this book has got everything covered from all different ends. Read by the author, this audiobook was mostly impossible to stop listening to. (The first bit was riveting, then until the halfway point it dragged with all of the background/world-building, and then I couldn't listen fast enough.) Hampton Sides has gotten praise all around the 75-verse for his books, but the more-recent praise from both Linda P and Mark finally convinced me to give this non-fiction book a shot. He's an excellent writer, a damn fine narrator, and he must be a heck of a great man to know. The fact that he didn't reveal James Earl Ray's name until the last quarter of the book, taking us through the case as the investigators did, was incredibly impressive and astounding. Mr. Sides certainly has a new fan in me. If you're looking for a book about this event in time, or have any curiosities about James Earl Ray, you can call off the search - this is the book you're looking for. 4.5 stars
    • 5/5
      “Discrimination is a hellhound that gnaws at Negroes in every waking moment of their lives” MLK 1967On a quiet evening in early April 1968, Martin Luther King was gunned down on a motel balcony. The dream is shattered. This breath-taking account follows James Earl Ray, ( his true name is not revealed for over 300 pages), as he escapes from prison a year earlier and begins to build new identities and slowly starts stalking the man he hates incessantly.The author documents this assassination, with meticulous detail, touching on J Edgar Hoover’s incredible disdain for King and then with a twist of irony, leading the FBI in tracking the killer down, which becomes one of the Bureaus finest moments. Also included is Ray’s infatuation with George Wallace and King struggling to keep his flagging Civil Rights crusade on track. This is all told in a strong narrative flow, that will leave the reader gasping and yearning for more. Highly recommended.
    • 5/5
      It has never taken me 3 weeks to read a 400 page book. I found myself reading, turning back pages and re-reading pages. It wasn't because this book is a difficult read, (reads like a novel) it was simply because I could not believe what I was reading. Hampton Sides has done a fantastic job on this book. The research that went into this book is amazing. Sides went to great depths to "track" James Earl Ray (Eric S Galt) and MLK leading up to his assassination. I thought "Hellhound" was an awesome read, and it has made me want to do more research on King. I was left with a feeling that MLK was a closet bi-sexual, and you will understand when you read the book. This book also proved to me that Jesse Jackson is a putz and a liar, and has been riding MLK's coat tails since his untimely death. I am still stunned by the book and plan to re-read and re-review.
    • 5/5
      Ask most people "Who is Eric Starvo Galt?" and you will receive a not unexpected blank look. But mention James Earl Ray and you will receive a much different reaction. This book chronicles the interwoven lives of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and James Earl Ray during the few months prior to Dr. King's assassination, through the heinous act itself, until Ray is finally hunted down and brought to justice. I have to commend the author for neither deifying Dr. King; nor stereotyping Mr. Ray. Chapters alternate throughout the book, telling the different stories as they happened. I thought the story was even handed and fair throughout. Well researched and documented, even though I am aware of what transpired, I still found myself turning the pages as if this was a thrilling novel. My feelings are best summed up by the following exchange between Andrew Young and Dexter King, Dr. King's seven year old son."Uncle Andy, this man didn't know our Daddy, did he?" speaking of King's killer. "Why do you say that?" Young asked. "Because if he had, he wouldn't have shot him. He was just an ignorant man who didn't know any better." Out of the mouth of babes... A fascinating inside look into one of America's darkest hours and the struggle to provide some measure of closure to an act that had the potential to turn America's racial struggle into a full blown civil war.
    • 4/5
      A very readable and interesting account of the movements of James Earl Ray before the fateful April 4th assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr.
    • 4/5
      A readable and clear picture of the movements that James Earl Ray made before the fateful April day when he pulled the trigger, killing Martin Luther King, Jr.
    • 5/5
      A fascinating book with alternating chapters on the life of James Earl Ray and Martin Luther King, Jr. in the months before and after King's murder and Ray's capture. Ray let himself be photographed after taking dance instructions in Los Angeles. Although he closed his eyes when the picture was snapped, this picture led to his identification and capture. He escaped from prison in Missouri in 1967 and then unbelieveably enough, in 1977 in Tennessee after he had been convicted of King's murder. The author found no evidence of a conspiracy although there was a belief that one existed.
    • 5/5
      In Hellhound on His Trail, Hampton Sides has written a history book that reads like a suspense/thriller novel. His story is the assassination of Martin Luther King by James Earl Ray. More than four decades after the event, Sides brings to life the characters involved and the era in which it occurred. He meticulously researched many of the minutia known about both the assassin and his victim during the period immediately preceding the killing and the three months thereafter, the time it took the FBI and numerous other law enforcement agencies to locate and arrest the killer. James Earl Ray was a loner, a loser, and an extreme racist who had spent much of his adult life in prison. He was also remarkably resourceful, streetwise, and canny. Moreover, he seemed preternaturally inconspicuous and unobtrusive. The narrative begins in spring of 1967 with Prisoner #00416-J (as he was then characterized) serving a term for armed robbery in the Missouri State Penitentiary at Jefferson City, a maximum-security facility. He accumulated some cash through trading in drugs and amphetamines, which were plentiful in the prison. He escaped by hiding scrunched up under and among some freshly baked loaves of bread that the prison bakery had sent out for delivery to the ostensibly trustworthy prisoners working outside the prison walls. He was resourceful enough to escape to Mexico without leaving a trace. He returned to the United States in November 1967, taking a large cache of marijuana, assumed the alias of Eric S. Galt, and blended into an underworld of cheap hotel and rooming houses. He was someone no one ever noticed. Martin Luther King was internationally famous for his work in breaking down the legal barriers of Jim Crow legislation in the South through non-violent protest. King had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1964 and had led a protest march to Washington where he had deliver his “I have a dream” speech, a paean to racial justice. But by late autumn 1967, his career was decidedly on a downward trend. Black leaders impatient with the slow pace of reform, like Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, and H. Rap Brown, had captured the imagination of many disaffected black citizens, and had incited numerous urban riots. Moreover King’s well-defined goal of abolishing discriminatory legislation and government regulation had been achieved, at least theoretically. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 had been enacted, negating most of Jim Crow legislation through federal preemption.With the passage of these laws, King then turned his energy to ameliorating the lot of the poor of all races, and not just that of poor blacks. That decision did not sit well with all his entourage. Nevertheless, King turned toward organizing another march on Washington to be called the Poor People’s Campaign, this one with the laudable goal of eradicating poverty, but with little idea of how that could be accomplished and with no specific proposals toward achieving the goal. By this time, King was considered to be a thorn in the side of President Lyndon Johnson, but was hated by the Director of the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover. Hoover thought King was a communist, and was particularly concerned about King’s proposed mass gathering of poor people in a tent city in the Capitol. The FBI conducted a campaign of spying on King. Although it uncovered some of King’s sexual escapades and leaked them to the press (not to mention, his wife Coretta), nothing seemed to come of the disclosures, which the press self-censored. It was clearly a different era in journalism. On February 1, 1968, a horrible accident causing the grizzly death of two black men working as garbage collectors in Memphis, Tennessee set in motion a chain of events that would culminate in King’s assassination. The two men were seeking shelter from some rain when the garbage truck on which they were working malfunctioned, caught both of them in its maw, pulled them into its grinding mechanism, and literally crushed them both. Their deaths triggered the formation of a labor union by the all black garbage collecting work force and an illegal strike (municipal workers were not permitted to unionize or to strike) to protest low wages and dangerous working conditions. The city government resisted the strike vigorously, if legalistically. Substitute workers were hired, but not enough to prevent the garbage from accumulating throughout the city. The strike attracted the attention of national labor and civil rights leaders, including James Lawson, a friend of MLK. Lawson persuaded King to lead a march in Memphis. The march was organized independently of King’s organization. Without King’s leadership and discipline over young hot heads, however, the march turned into a riot of looting and vandalism. King was discredited and very embarrassed. King’s second trip to Memphis was much more successful than the first, since he and his organization were able to arrange a dignified non-violent protest march. Sides’ narrative intersperses Galt/Ray’s peregrinations with King’s preparation for the Poor People’s Campaign. Galt became obsessed with the possibility of killing King, following his travels closely through the press. Galt learned King would return to Memphis and that he would be staying at the Lorraine motel, a black-owned enterprise. Galt rented a room in a cheap boarding house that provided him a second story view of the Lorraine’s balcony and courtyard. He purchased a high power hunting rifle, a powerful optical scope, and soft-tipped ammunition. He knew little about guns, but said he needed a deadly weapon because he would be hunting large game. King was basking in the aura of a successful march and standing on his balcony waiting for others in his entourage to join him for dinner. Galt fire one shot, hitting King in the jaw. The soft-tipped bullet then careened through his throat and into his shoulder. King died shortly thereafter in a hospital operating room. Several anecdotes add poignancy to the aftermath of the assassination. King had spent his last night with Georgia Davis, one of his mistresses. She attempted to get into the ambulance to accompany King to the hospital, but Andrew Young avoided some bad press by touching her shoulder and saying, “Georgia, I don’t think you want to do that.” Jesse Jackson smeared his shirt with King’s blood and tried to claim he was the last person to speak to King. Others in King’s immediate circle strongly admonished him for grandstanding. King’s closest friends and successor, Ralph Abernathy, tried to carry on his legacy by completing the Poor People’s Campaign, which proved to be a disaster without King. Tens of thousands of people erected a tent city on the National Mall, but milled aimlessly for weeks, accomplishing little but incurring the ire of the national government and alienating many white former sympathizers. The final one-fifth of the book covers Galt’s escape, his travel to Canada, England, Portugal, and back to England, where he was finally captured after the most exhaustive manhunt in history. He had sought to get to South Africa, where he thought the apartheid government might welcome him as a hero, or at least not extradite him. The author shows how the FBI changed over night from trying to discredit King to trying to catch his killer. Much of the credit must go to Attorney General Ramsey Clark, who may have hated Hoover as much as Hoover hated King. It was only through extremely arduous and thorough police work that Galt was identified as James Earl Ray and located at London’s Heathrow Airport. Evaluation: The book is fast paced, well-written, very detailed, and thoroughly researched. It manages to describe events without much speculation, basing its assertions on the testimony of the participants, particularly of the killer. The description of the police-FBI investigation reads like a crime thriller. Other reviewers have observed that it contains little that had not been written before, but it provides a sometimes heart-pounding refresher for people like me who have forgotten many of the details of forty years ago.
    • 5/5
      I thoroughly enjoyed this book, which I picked up after I heard the author interviewed on NPR. It's the fascinating tale of an oddly forgettable man--James Earl Ray, the assassin of Martin Luther King Jr. Ray used a number of aliases both before and after the crime, and in the narrative Sides refers to Ray by his name du jour, whether that's Eric Galt or Ramon Sneyd or any of his other pseudonyms. This technique is not as distracting as it sounds. If you like true crime or history, this book is definitely worth reading.