From the acclaimed bestselling author of Ghost Soldiers and Blood and Thunder, a taut, intense narrative about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the largest manhunt in American history. 

On April 23, 1967, Prisoner #416J, an inmate at the notorious Missouri State Penitentiary, escaped in a breadbox. Fashioning himself Eric Galt, this nondescript thief and con man—whose real name was James Earl Ray—drifted through the South, into Mexico, and then Los Angeles, where he was galvanized by George Wallace’s racist presidential campaign.

On February 1, 1968, two Memphis garbage men were crushed to death in their hydraulic truck, provoking the exclusively African American workforce to go on strike. Hoping to resuscitate his faltering crusade, King joined the sanitation workers’ cause, but their march down Beale Street, the historic avenue of the blues, turned violent. Humiliated, King fatefully vowed to return to Memphis in April.

With relentless storytelling drive, Sides follows Galt and King as they crisscross the country, one stalking the other, until the crushing moment at the Lorraine Motel when the drifter catches up with his prey. Against the backdrop of the resulting nationwide riots and the pathos of King’s funeral, Sides gives us a riveting cross-cut narrative of the assassin’s flight and the sixty-five-day search that led investigators to Canada, Portugal, and England—a massive manhunt ironically led by Hoover’s FBI.

Magnificent in scope, drawing on a wealth of previously unpublished material, this nonfiction thriller illuminates one of the darkest hours in American life—an example of how history is so often a matter of the petty bringing down the great.

To read an excerpt from Chapter One of Hellhound on His Trail, click HERE.

Hampton Sides (born 1962) is an American historian and magazine journalist. He is the author of Hellhound on His Trail, Ghost Soldiers, Blood and Thunder, and other bestselling works of narrative history and literary non-fiction. Sides is editor-at-large for Outside magazine and has written for such periodicals as National Geographic, The New Yorker, Esquire, Preservation, Men's Journal, Men's Vogue, and The Washington Post. His magazine work, collected in numerous published anthologies, has been twice nominated for National Magazine Awards for feature writing. Ghost Soldiers , a World War II narrative about the rescue of Bataan Death March survivors, has sold slightly over a million copies worldwide and has been translated into a dozen foreign languages. The book was the subject of documentaries on PBS and the The History Channel, and was the basis for the 2005 Miramax film, "The Great Raid." Ghost Soldiers won the 2002 PEN USA Award for non-fiction and the Discover Award from Barnes & Noble. The book's success led Sides to create The Ghost Soldiers Endowment Fund, a non-profit foundation dedicated to preserving the memory of the sacrifices made by Bataan and Corregidor veterans by funding relevant archives, museums, and memorials. Sides' Blood and Thunder  focuses on the life and times of controversial frontiersman Kit Carson, and his role in the conquest of the American West. Blood and Thunder was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2006 by Time magazine, and was selected as that year's best history title by both the History Book Club and the Western Writers of America. Blood and Thunder was the subject of a major documentary on the PBS program "The American Experience" and is currently under development for the screen. A native of Memphis with a BA in history from Yale, Sides lives in Santa Fe with his wife Anne and their three boys, all soccer players. He is a past fellow of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony, and the Japan Society, and a media fellow at Stanford's Hoover Institution. He is an adviser and board member of the Mayborn Journalism School's annual conference on Literary Non-fiction. Hampton has guest-lectured at Columbia University, Yale, Stanford, Colorado College, SMU, the Autry Museum of the American West, and the National World War II Museum, among other institutions. He has appeared as a guest on such national broadcasts as The American Experience, the Today Show, Book TV, the History Channel, Fresh Air, CNN, CBS Sunday Morning, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, and NPR's "All Things Considered."

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