Top 5 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:

Lone Wolf
by Maryanne Vollers (2006)

Eric Rudolph, the cunning neo-Nazi nutjob behind such crimes as the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing, became something of a folk hero when he eluded an extensive, years-long manhunt by scavenging in the mountain fastnesses of North Carolina. In this engrossing true-crime narrative, Maryanne Vollers carefully unsnarls the mysteries of one of America's most notorious homegrown terrorists and shows how Rudolph was able to stay just ahead of the authorities for so long. (Among Rudolph's weirder survival tips: poisoning dogs with stolen antifreeze before they could reveal his whereabouts.) Although he fits into a larger American tradition of disaffected loners that includes Ted Kaczynski and Timothy McVeigh, Rudolph ultimately proves as hard to fathom as the fugitive was hard to catch.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue