Reviews
Manhunt: The Twelve-day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer
by James L. Swanson
Reviewed by: Percival
In Manhunt: the 12-Day Chase for Lincoln’s Killer, James L. Swanson has given us a riveting, haunting account of the pursuit and capture of John Wilkes Booth. Through prodigious research and in compelling prose, Swanson recreates the frantic hunt for Booth across the Maryland and Virginia countryside.
Abraham Lincoln believed in the power of dreams to foretell the future. On the morning of the day of his death, he announced: “I had that strange dream again last night.” This recurring dream was particularly troubling to him, for he dreamed that he wandered the corridors of the White House until he came to the East Room, where a weeping crowd was gathered around a coffin on a bier. “Who has died?” he asked in his dream. “The president,” he was told.
Booth, “the handsomest man in America,” came from a family of actors that included his father, Junius Brutus, and his brother Edwin. He was famous (but not as famous—notorious—as he would become), sought-after by the ladies, a young man who had, it seemed, a brilliant career to look forward to. But Booth was also a rabid Confederate sympathizer who was convinced that he would be thanked for ridding the world of the “tyrant,” Abraham Lincoln. Booth got his fame—his infamy—in the end, but not for the reasons he expected. He died in a barn in Maryland after 12 days of agony, having broken his leg in his leap to the stage after murdering Lincoln in the president’s box at Ford’s Theater. Swanson gives us the complete story, including the roles of Booth’s conspirators, the details of their other attempted assassinations in Washington that evening, and the sometimes tragic endings to the lives of many of the innocent participants in the events of that fateful night, April 14, Good Friday, 1865.
Published to rave reviews, Manhunt has been nominated by the Mystery Writers of America for an “Edgar” for Best Fact Crime.