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This book solidly succeeds in the genre of works that promise to be of compelling reading to the non-history-minded reader while being based on solid historical research. James L. Swanson, a historian and attorney in Washington D.C., shows his knowledge of everything Abraham Lincoln. He provides a new twist to the subject of Lincoln's assassination and aftermath in a field which is jammed to the rafters with Civil War/Lincoln books.

Swanson's twist in writing of this period of national distress is his use of a style akin to that of a crime reporter. He doesn't sensationalize as much as he uses a narrative style designed to keep the story moving and the reader engrossed in finding out how events unfold to the ultimate conclusion, when Lincoln's assassins were brought to justice. The title, "Manhunt", says it all. This is as compelling a chase story as "The Fugitive," only it's over a hundred years earlier, and based on real events. It is no secret that the book no sooner took its place on the best-seller list than speculation began spreading about who would play the parts of the characters in a movie based on it. It was rumored the main pursuer of the criminals would be played by, guess who, Harrison Ford. Even Swanson has joined in, with his wish to have Johnny Depp play John Wilkes Booth.

Making the pursuit of the killers of Abraham Lincoln the focus of the book places Booth in the central role. Swanson provides biographical background on Booth, as the upcoming popular actor son of the century's most famous actor, Junius Brutus Booth. John Wilkes was a southern sympathiser during the Civil War. He spent time plotting grand crimes against the federal government while he toured the country as an actor. He used his considerable persuasive skills to enlist a group of co-conspirators who would meet in Virginia, Maryland and the District of Columbia. A meeting location was Mary Surratt's tavern, and one of Booth's confidants was her son, John. Booth hatched a wild plan during 1864, while the Civil War raged, to kidnap President Lincoln and deliver him to the Confederate government, in an effort to demoralize the North and possibly end the war.

That plan never reached fruition, but Booth's hatred to the North and toward Lincoln only intensified, reaching its climax at the end of hostilities in the spring of 1865. General Robert E. Lee had surrendered Confederate forces and the South's capital of Richmond had been captured. It was only a matter of time until Southern President Jefferson Davis and his cabinet were captured, and the war would be over. Public displays of triumph and relief of the end of the war were being held throughout the North, while southerners were left to think about their fate. Booth had already decided. He would decapitate the leadership of the federal government by killing the Secretary of State, William Seward; Vice President Andrew Johnson; and the President.

Booth's plan, audacious as it was, succeeded in its most important element and only failed to succeed due to his associates' lack of ability to perform their tasks. You have to admit that Booth almost couldn't ignore devising some sort of assassination plan, what with his hatreds, and the president's publicized desire to attend the popular Laura Keene play at Ford's Theater in Washington. Booth knew every inch of the theater and was known and trusted by its staff as a great actor who had performed there. The assassins' plans were to simultaneously kill the vice president at his hotel and the secretary of state at his home, where he was recuperating after a serious carriage accident, while Booth stole into the almost unguarded private box of Lincoln at Ford's. George Atzerodt lost his nerve and didn't attack Johnson, while Lewis Powell bluffed himself into Seward's home and savagely attacked him. Seward miraculously survived his wounds but Booth was successful in shooting a bullet into the back of Lincoln's head and seriously injuring an army major in his box with a knife before escaping the theater.

There is so much that happened after the attacks, and Swanson is up to the task of keeping us glued to the pages as Booth slipped out of a Washington still guarded by military sentries and made a run on horseback, with his young associate David Herold toward Virginia. The conspirators would spend time living in a pine thicket while arranging with sympathizers to cross the Potomac River into Virginia.

Swanson relates many details of how this story only gets more interesting with age. There is the injured Booth, running sometimes ahead of the slow-moving news of the day, hoping to open a newspaper describing him as a hero; the great American tragedy of Lincoln, unconsious but struggling for an entire night in a bed while slowly dying; the Secretary of War, Edwin Stanton, who spent every minute of that night by Lincoln's side, while, already, using his considerable wartime powers to commandeer all of the available resources of the U.S. government to hunt down the killers; the southerners, who knowingly or unknowingly aided Booth until he arrived at the farm of the Garrett's, who were unaware of what he had done; Booth's defiant refusal to surrender inside a corn crib at the Garrett farm that had been set on fire by pursuing soldiers, and his being shot, against orders, by a soldier named Boston Corbett; the life-long lasting celebrity status of Corbett for shooting Booth; Booth's night-long death watch on the Garrett porch, mirroring the ordeal he had put Lincoln through less than two weeks previous.

It's possible that Booth could have been captured alive there, (Herold did surrender), but he knew by then he was in the last act of his own tragedy. Stanton's dragnet later captured all of the conspirators. They were found guilty for their association with Booth in a military tribunal. One of the most interesting scenes of Swanson's to me was the dispatching of Major General Winfield Scott Hancock, a true hero of the Civil War, to the Old Arsenal Penitentiary with the death sentences of Lewis Powell, Mary Surratt, David Herold and George Atzerodt.

The spirit of revenge against anyone remotely associated with Booth led to the arrests of numerous other people. Farmer Garrett himself was thrown in prison. Also jailed, for a time, was Ford's owner, John T. Ford. He was released after thirty-nine days, but Stanton ordered his theater confiscated and its interior gutted. The marvelous restoration of Ford's Theater in the 1960's meticulously reproduces the theater's appearance from the night Lincoln was killed. It had been used for years as a government office building (Ford was reimbursed for the building by the government in 1866). Unbelievably, the excessive load of tons of government office equipment caused all of the floors to collapse during 1893, killing twenty-two workers and injuring scores more.

The most publicized case of alleged collateral guilt by association with Booth concerns the case of Dr. Samuel Mudd. Booth arrived at the Mudd farm with Herold while in flight from the assassination. Mudd set Booth's broken leg and arranged for a local carpenter to build a set of crutches; both fugitives rested at the Mudd home over night and left the following day. Mudd was later arrested, tried and convicted of conspiracy for aiding Lincoln's conspirators. Mudd narrowly missed receiving a sentence of hanging, and instead was sentenced to life in prison. He served his sentence at Fort Jefferson in the Gulf of Mexico, near the Florida Keys. His heroic efforts of saving inmates and staff of the prison during a yellow fever epidemic in 1867, taking over the prison's medical responsibilities from the dead prison's doctor, won him release from confinement by President Andrew Johnson in 1869.

Mudd's grandson, Dr. Richard Mudd, has spent decades trying to prove Mudd's innocence and obtain a presidential pardon for him. The Mudd family's position was reflected in a 1980 movie, "The Ordeal of Dr. Mudd", starring Dennis Weaver in what I believe was the best performance of his career. The viewpoint portrayed was of a doctor who followed his professional ethics in setting a leg of a person in need, without being told how the injury occurred. Dr. Mudd's predicament was very moving but, in Swanson's opinion, a little too disingenuous. Swanson points out that Mudd had had contact with Booth in December, 1864, in Bryantown Maryland, near the Mudd farm, when the Lincoln kidnap plot was being hatched. He also met with Booth a month later in Washington. Investigators who followed up on Booth's activities prior to the assassination found out about these meetings. Mudd gave a sworn statement admitting his November meeting, without admitting any ulterior motive, and omitting his December meeting with Booth. Just as damning was Mudd's failure to notify authorities in Maryland of his involvement with Booth after newspapers carrying the assassination news and Booth's identity were being circulated in his town. These deceptions were enough to convict him of conspiracy; Swanson doesn't buy the revisionist version of events from the Mudd family.

We know that Abraham Lincoln was elevated from great leader to folk hero by the manner of his death. Swanson's book sets the record on his killer, Booth, who committed a despicable act and yet became a legendary dramatic figure who continues to captivate readers of history. Many people wish he had never lived, while, Swanson notes, there are those in the South who still celebrate his life. Even the restored theater which commemorates the crime against Lincoln also serves as a Booth museum. Such is history's disdain of neatly wrapped endings.