Bookshelf: 'Hellhound,' 'Shanghai Girls' on audio

It's the true-crime writer's greatest challenge: How to create suspense when your readers know how the story ends. When the crime in question is one of the century's most notorious, that foreknowledge has the potential to sabotage the story entirely. So it's a testament to Hampton Sides' skill that "Hellhound on His Trail: The Stalking of Martin Luther King, Jr. and the International Hunt for His Assassin" (Random House Audio, 12 CDs, $45) is so nailbitingly riveting.

As "Hellhound" opens, in April 1967, a man who goes by the name of John Galt makes a bold escape from Jefferson City Penitentiary in Missouri, zigzagging to Mexico and Los Angeles under a succession of aliases. Meanwhile, Martin Luther King Jr.'s Poor People's Campaign is foundering; his Southern Christian Leadership Conference is unable to recapture the glory of its historic March on Washington four years earlier.

In February 1968, King is invited to Memphis to support striking garbage workers and the march he organizes devolves into a riot. In an effort to redeem himself and his movement, King returns to Memphis a month later - against his advisers' wishes - to stage the kind of orderly, quasi-sacramental demonstration that is the SCLC's hallmark. King's every move is reported by the media, and a would-be assassin has only to glance at the front page to discover where his quarry is staying.

On April 4, Galt's and King's paths converge, tragically, at the Lorraine Motel. More than half of "Hellhound" chronicles the fallout from the murder: King's family is almost fatalistically resigned, his lieutenants cannot hold the movement together, the country erupts into racial violence, conspiracy plots abound. The killer escapes.

Up until the assassination, the FBI had considered King a threat to national security and J. Edgar Hoover spent substantial resources tarring his reputation. Hoover would have been happy to let the Memphis authorities handle the investigation, but the intervention of U.S. Attorney General Ramsay Clark leads the FBI to undertake one of the most extensive manhunts in American history.

And what a manhunt. Thousands of law enforcement officials in half a dozen countries are pressed into service. This was an era before DNA evidence and, more significantly, before computers were used for police work. Fingerprint records had to be matched with the naked eye. It's a huge break in the case when Hoover's deputy Cartha DeLoach has the idea to limit the fingerprint comparison to those of 53,000 prison escapees as opposed to the 3 million on file at FBI headquarters.

Sides keeps the killer's real identity a mystery until the field agents begin to unravel his history. We, the readers, don't learn that "John Galt" is yet another alias for a benighted hick named James Earl Ray until the FBI figures it out. In 1968, there were doubtless thousands of white racists who wanted to see Martin Luther King Jr. dead. What motivated Ray alone to pull the trigger remains a mystery - although Sides does address the suggestion that Ray did not act alone and puts forth a few theories about who may have helped him.

"Hellhound on His Trail" is narrated by the author. As he says in an introductory note, he is a Memphis native, and his genteel Southern inflection adds a measure of authenticity to the telling. He also seems to get a real kick out of bestowing upon his villain a spirited backwoods accent.

And now for something completely different.

If there were a Chinese word that meant schmaltz, I would use it - affectionately - to describe Lisa See's "Shanghai Girls" (Random House Audio, 11 CDs, $39.95), the relentlessly dramatic story of two sisters whose idyllic life in the cosmopolitan Shanghai of the 1930s is shattered by the Japanese invasion.

Pearl (older, smarter) and May (prettier, flakier) are essentially sold by their father to pay off his gambling debts. The buyer intends them for his two sons, who live in Los Angeles. At first the girls are horrified, but they soon realize that their only chance of survival lies in immigrating to the United States.

The girls had been told that their future in-laws were rich beyond measure, but it turns out that everyone lives in one cramped apartment and works in Chinatown slinging chop suey and hawking back scratchers. The tragedies endured by Pearl and May include secret childbirth, childlessness, know-it-all children, government harassment, prejudice, poverty and the kind of heart-rending rivalry that only sisters can experience.

Despite its mechanical litany of woes, the novel does present vivid portraits of prewar Shanghai and, most compellingly, of Los Angeles' Chinese community during the mid 20th century. Janet Song's passionate (if somewhat monotonous) narration makes this an eminently good listen.