Hampton Sides discusses & signs his new book Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin (Doubleday, $28.95). Sides' research on this subject forms much of the basis for PBS's documentary Road to Memphis, which originally aired on May 3. Sides illuminates not only the forces that culminated in King's assassination; he also reveals the largely forgotten story of how his death led to the largest manhunt in American history.

His research included hundreds of thousands of unpublished documents including crime scene photos, police reports, unexpurgated FBI files, and audio tapes - all from a retired Memphis cop who has compiled the most comprehensive digital archive about the assassination. Sides says, "Every non-fiction writer needs to find a guy named Vince."

Sides is an American historian and magazine journalist whose previous books include Ghost Soldiers, which won the 2002 PEN USA Award for non-fiction, and the Bookworks favorite Blood and Thunder: An Epic Tale of the American West, which is currently under development for film and was named one of the 10 Best Books of 2006 by Time Magazine. 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.

Hampton, who now lives in Santa Fe and 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."