Hellhound on His Trail: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt in American History

The nonfiction book, Hellhound on His Hound: The Electrifying Account of the Largest Manhunt in American History by Hampton Sides is about the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the manhunt for King’s assassin James Earl Ray. The Tennessee-born Writer Hampton Sides was six years old in Memphis when King was assassinated in April 1968. Sides’s father represented King as a lawyer when he was in Memphis in the strike of the city’s garbage worker (Sides “A Note to Readers”). I read the book on my Kindle. Hellhound on His Hound covers the last days of Martin Luther King, Jr. The book also covers James Earl Ray, George Wallace when he run for President in 1968, Lurleen Wallace, J. Edgar Hoover at the end of his career, and other historical figures. The book also covers Memphis and Los Angeles in the 1960s. The book contains “A Note on Sources” (Sides 409-411), a section of notes, and a bibliography. The book contains pictures of black and white photographs. Sides writes that “certainly the culture-omnipresent in 1968, just as it is now-was complicit in Ray’s crime” (Sides 403). I saw Hellhound on His Trail as a good sequel to Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI by David Gunn which covers an episode in the early history of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) under the leadership of the J. Edgar Hoover. Hampton Sides’s book, Hellhound on His Trail, covers the FBI near the end of Hoover’s tenure as head of the FBI. Sides’s Hellhound on His Trail is a well-done book about the tragic murder of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the manhunt for his assassin. Works Cited: Gunn, David. 2017. Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI. New York: Penguin Random House LLC.