Five best manhunt tales

Hampton Sides is the author of Ghost Soldiers, Blood and Thunder, and other bestselling works of narrative history. His most recent book, Hellhound On His Trail, is about the murder of Martin Luther King Jr. and the international manhunt for assassin James Earl Ray.

For the Wall Street Journal he named a five best list of manhunt books, including:

Manhunt
by James L. Swanson (2006)

After umpteen-thousand books on Abraham Lincoln's life and times, who would have thought that there could be another one as thrilling and briskly alive as this? James L. Swanson finds fresh ground by tightly focusing on the search for John Wilkes Booth—a search that employed thousands of men, horses and dogs. By slowing down the clock, the author allows us to see the story unfold day by day and sometimes minute by minute, with the vantage point shifting between the hunters and the hunted. As often happens in chase narratives, I found myself thinking like the fugitive and perversely rooting for him to get away. "Manhunt" demonstrates a pleasurable truth about well-crafted nonfiction: Real, pulse-pounding suspense can be extracted even from stories that (we think) we already know.

Read about another book on the list.

Manhunt is one of Kate White's 6 favorite books.

--Marshal Zeringue