Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King Jr. and the International Manhunt for His Assassin by Hampton Sides

(Doubleday, 459 pages, $28.95)

Among today’s writers of dramatic nonfiction, “no one does it better than Hampton Sides,” said Mike Householder in the Associated Press. Sides’ latest book, an “impossible-to-put-down” account of the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., is “every bit as good as any of the fiction thrillers being written these days.” Sides’ ingenious storytelling strategy doesn’t hurt, said Laura Miller in Salon.com. Assassin James Earl Ray is not identified by his true name until Page 321. He’s “Prisoner #00416-J,” a cipher who escapes from a Missouri prison in Sides’ gripping opening, then drifts from Mexico to Los Angeles to Memphis as his date with history draws near.

Ray led a truly “pathetic” existence, said John Beifuss in the Memphis Commercial Appeal. Criminal violence ran in the killer’s family, and his parents were so poor that one of their homes collapsed because they had cannibalized its structure for firewood. By the time we meet Ray, in April 1967, he is “a stickup artist, a pill popper,” and about to start producing pornographic films. Soon, however, he throws himself into volunteer work for segregationist ­presidential candidate George ­Wallace. That campaign, Sides believes, created a “climate of hate” that encouraged Ray to embrace violence.

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Sides’ account of this historic crime will never be considered the definitive version, said Douglas A. Blackmon in The Wall Street Journal. He pays more attention to the killer than to the victim, and “he only fleetingly addresses the belief of surviving King family members” that Ray wasn’t acting alone when he fired the fatal bullet from a high-powered rifle. Until such questions are confronted directly, some will still doubt that a “bumbling” petty criminal like Ray could assassinate such a major figure, then elude capture for several weeks. In the end, Sides’ fascinating reconstruction of the shooting is “a reminder of how little we know about it.”