The Wizard of the Nile: the Hunt for Africa's Most Wanted Matthew Green Portobello Books, 335pp, £16.99

This is the story of how Matt Green took time off from his job at the Reuters news agency in Nairobi and went to northern Uganda to look for the elusive Joseph Kony - and (eventually) found him. And that pretty much sums up what this book is about because, in its 300 or so pages, Green's story of getting the story very much eclipses the story itself.

Kony (pronounced Coi-yn) is the leader of a rebel group known as the Lord's Resistance Army (LRA), which is made up mostly of members of an ethnic group in northern Uganda called the Acholis. Since 1986, anywhere from several hundred to several thousand Acholi career soldiers and younger recruits have waged war against the Ugandan government of President Yoweri Mus eveni. The movement was founded by Kony's aunt on the tenets of the Ten Commandments and he took over as de facto leader in 1988.

Described by some as a psychopath, Kony has both bamboozled his followers with claims of being in touch with divine spirits and terrorised them with threats of severe punishment - execution, for example, is the punishment for desertion. Kony's army has turned against its own society, press-ganging children into its ranks, giving abducted girls to rebel commanders as wives, and committing a series of alleged atrocities that has led to an indictment from the International Criminal Court in The Hague.

Green begins his search for Kony on a bus hurtling towards Gulu, the town at the centre of Uganda's 20-year civil war. There, he meets a former schoolboy rebel, Moses, to whose experiences of abduction, fear and fighting he returns throughout the narrative of the book.

I could have done without extraneous detail such as Moses listening to hip-hop on Green's iPod, but basically Moses becomes the human face of the rebel army, the Ugandan with whom British readers can (we hope) identify. Most poignantly, he becomes the boy who, after years in the rebel force, escapes and comes home to . . . Well, nothing much - a crime you could say was almost as great as the war itself, as governments such as Uganda's fail to bother to create opportunities for young people to do something with their lives other than fight.

From Gulu, Green makes a foray to Kony's home village and one of the inhumanely congested camps into which the Ugandan government herded hundreds of thousands of local Acholi people, ostensibly in an attempt to isolate rebels and protect the civilian population. Here, he begins to explore the rich mythology that makes Acholi culture so alluring - its religion of a multitude of spirits that Green correctly notes is part belief system, part therapy for a people whose collective psychology has proved curiously resilient, yet also fragile. Green also explores the history of Acholiland, ravaged by 19th-century Arab slavery, trampled by European explorers and missionaries, confused by Catholicism and finally used by Britain as a repository for recruits for its Second World War campaigns in Ethiopia, North Africa and Burma.

Despite this toxic blend of irrational beliefs and historical causes, Green does not lose sight of the fact that it was the rebel army's military skills, plus the weapons they often received from the Sudanese government, that kept them a step ahead of Museveni's government troops - though it seems that Museveni hasn't always wanted the war to end, a point made forcefully in the book when the president's envoy Betty Bigombe recounts how, in early 1994, the president dismissed her success at securing the promise of a peace deal from Kony, choosing to continue the war instead.

And Museveni was not the only one wanting it to continue, Green points out. Though the rebels turned on their own people, committing atrocities, many Acholis do, in a sense, support them - first, because they are (often literally) "their own children", and second, because those with reason to resent Museveni see it as a way of giving him the finger, of saying that, despite everything, as a people they are not yet defeated.

Green did his research between January and July 2006. As he moves across the border into Sudan, his pursuit of Kony grows ever more frantic, leading him to spend vast amounts of time, and sometimes money, careering from Juba in Southern Sudan to Khartoum in the north and back again; into the bush on the border between Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo - where, by now, Kony and his closest mates are hanging out in a game park - back to Kenya, and then, in a mad hurry, back to Juba again. Amid all this dashing around, Green makes some valuable points - for example, though morally it may be the right thing for the ICC to issue war crimes indictments against Kony and his top commanders, practically it makes it all the more difficult to get them to surrender.

There is a fiasco in the bush when a top Southern Sudanese official, Riek Machar, tries to get one of the LRA's top commanders to attend peace talks in Juba, and much toing and froing as Machar tries to winkle Kony out of hiding. At this point, a small posse of journalists intrudes. For much of the book, Green has been consciously trying to get beyond the trite shorthand that journalists use to keep their copy tight, but now, the unseen presence of Reuters and its like stalks his every move.

In the end, Green does meet Kony - a saddened man, slightly incoherent, pathetic and banal. Green's short history of this strange war is an honest and factual account, devoid of the sort of exaggeration and self-aggrandisement to which journalists are prone. But a book isn't just something that's long - it also has to be finely focused, and in all its extraneous detail, The Wizard of the Nile shows the gap between what good journalists and good writers do. It is a gulf that a few journalists manage to bridge by dumping tales of their own exotic meanderings and writing a narrative which gets straight to the heart of the story - and stays there.

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