An American pilot sentenced to a Russian prison for espionage, a government coverup, a controversy that lingers beyond the pilot’s exoneration to his death in a helicopter crash years later, and a son’s determination to get to the truth.

The story has the markings of a great fictional tale — it’s even the basis for a Steven Spielberg movie — but Francis Gary Powers and the 1960 U-2 incident are very much real. Thanks to the efforts of Francis Gary Powers Jr. and biographer Keith Dunnavant, a new account of Francis Gary Powers and the incident that put his name in the history books are now available in “Spy Pilot: Francis Gary Powers, the U-2 Incident and a Controversial Cold War Legacy.”

Dunnavant said he’d been working on the project with Powers Jr. since 2012, when he saw a New York Times story about the senior Powers being awarded the Silver Star medal.

“Since I knew he’d been dead for a while, my reporter’s instincts were kind of aroused and I smelled a story there,” said Dunnavant, a journalist and former editor with multiple biographies already on his resume.

Powers died in 1977, when the helicopter he was piloting for KNBC Channel 4 reportedly ran out of fuel and crashed, killing him and a cameraman. Forty-five years later, his son would be working with Dunnavant to publish his story.

“It ended up becoming two books,” Dunnavant said. “One story, a biography of the father; and then a memoir of the son, in the context of kind of chasing the father’s ghost.”

The book is written in two points-of-view to further show this. The story begins in third-person, with a foreword from the son of former Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev. It shifts to first-person at the birth of Powers Jr. and continues on from his point of view.

“It was kind of a risky thing to do,” Dunnavant said. “We decided pretty late in the process, after having tried it various ways, that we just needed to take the risk and go to the first-person basically in the middle of the book, because the reader needed to feel Gary’s pain and his journey on a very deep level.”

That journey includes the anxiety as much as the pride in being associated with the Powers name right alongside the junior Powers’ struggle to honor the truth in his dad’s legacy while forging his own. To tell it in a book, Dunnavant and Powers Jr. relied on reel-to-reel audio tapes, letters from the Powers Family Archives, entries from Powers’ personal journal, interviews with those who knew the family and even recently declassified government documents from Powers’ time in the CIA and the U-2 program.

Dunnavant called it one of the longest books he’s worked on, saying he always thought there was more to the Powers story. He feels they solved the mystery and redefined Powers’ place in the history books.

“Even if you don’t remember those days, I hope the reader will ask themselves, ‘How will you feel if the people in your community said bad things about your father?’ Then imagine the community you’re thinking about is the entire USA. How would you react? How would it affect your life?” Dunnavant said. “Would you try to change people’s minds? Because that’s what Gary Jr. did.”

“Spy Pilot” is published by Prometheus Books and distributed by Penguin Random House. Visit https://bit.ly/SpyPilot for purchase information.