*Starred Review* In 1967, an escaped prisoner, drifter, and racist, while voluntarily working on the presidential campaign for George Wallace in California, got the idea of stalking and killing Martin Luther King Jr. Using the alias Eric Galt, he traveled to his native South and kept track of King as the civil rights leader marched in Memphis for the striking garbage collectors. Galt, whose real name was James Earl Ray, methodically planned and executed the assassination then fled to Canada and Europe, hoping eventually to immigrate to South Africa. Drawing on interviews and previously unpublished resources, Sides builds suspense on parallel tracks of the civil rights leader and the assassin as the day of their shared destiny approaches. In the second half of the book, Sides offers riveting details of the FBI investigation leads, blind alleys, conspiracy theories amid rumors that the agency and its leader, J. Edgar Hoover, were somehow behind the assassination. Sides captures the zeitgeist of the 1960s: the racial tumult, the populist backlash, the counterculture self-realization mood. Despite the fact that readers know much of the history, they will be swept up in the narrative because Sides writes with immediacy, intimacy, and the pacing of a thriller.--Bush, Vanessa Copyright 2010 Booklist