Sniper

"Sniper" is the behind-the-scenes story of one of the most frightening rampages to occur in U.S. history-and how it was stopped.

For more than threeweeks, the nation watched in disbelief as Washington, D.C., and its surrounding suburbs were held hostage by anonymous gunmen shooting innocent civilians at random. "Sniper" is the definitiveaccount of those alleged gunmen, John Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, and the massive manhunt that ended with their capture by a heavily armed SWAT team in an early-morning raid at an interstate highway reststop.

Two "Washington Post "reporters, Sari Horwitz and Michael E. Ruane, retrace the steps of Muhammad and Malvo from their first meeting on the island of Antigua toMalvo's defiant confession in a Virginia jail. Drawing on exclusive reporting about that confession, internal police documents, and a wide range of law-enforcement sources, Horwitz and Ruane track inremarkable detail the murderous trail Muhammad and Malvo are accused of having followed to the Washington area and reconstruct the eerie way in which the two moved invisibly around the nation's capital in themidst of one of the largest police investigations in U.S. history.

Horwitz and Ruane also take you inside the police command center where local and state police, joined by the federalgovernment's most experienced crime fighters, worked desperately to stop the killings, unaware that a fundamental error-investigators were wrongly fixated on a whitevan-was allowing Muhammad and Malvo to slip through the dragnet. We meet FBI negotiators, veteran detectives, forensics experts, prosecutors, and politicians who faced perhaps the biggest challenge of theircareers as they confronted frustrating setbacks, logistical nightmares, and the overwhelming pressure of a high-stakes investigation. In a fast-paced narrative that outdoes even the most acclaimed television copshows, " Sniper "recounts the extraordinary police work that enabled investigators to quickly exploit the clues handed to them by Muhammad and Malvo that finally led to theirarrest.

Part gripping drama, part real-life portrait of law enforcement at work, "Sniper" is also a cautionary tale about the vulnerability of American society in an age ofterrorism. "From the Hardcover edition."