Yet, Galt himself seems to inhabit the half-world of the best-selling paperback thriller. Every incident in this compelling account of King's stalking and slaying during America's annus horribilis – 1968 – has a factual reference to back it up every detail aspires to truth. He follows Shelby Foote in "employing the novelist's methods without his licence". Hampton Sides's technique gives history a fictional sheen. And then Eric Starvo Galt packs his bags, quits LA, and begins a long, winding, brooding drive – to Alabama, Georgia, and Memphis, Tennessee, where, with a single shot from a flop-house bathroom window, he will assassinate King. Meanwhile, far away in South Carolina, the world's most renowned civil rights leader plans his next campaign: for a Poor People's Army to march on Washington, setting poverty alongside racism as imperatives for reform. I n Los Angeles, a white-faced, soft-featured man nobody remembers very clearly sits in his room and keeps avid track of the movements of Martin Luther King.
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