This book is The Orchid Thief for the fly-fishing and birding set. the kind of intelligent reported account that alerts us to a threat and that, one hopes, will never itself be endangered. The New York Times Book Review Fascinating from the first page to the last-you wont be able to put it down. a complex tale of greed, deception, and ornithological sabotage. The gripping story of a bizarre and shocking crime, and one mans relentless pursuit of justice, The Feather Thief is also a fascinating exploration of obsession, and mans destructive instinct to harvest the beauty of nature.

What would possess a person to steal dead birds? Had Edwin paid the price for his crime? What became of the missing skins? In his search for answers, Johnson was catapulted into a years-long, worldwide investigation. He was soon consumed by the strange case of the feather thief.

Two years later, Kirk Wallace Johnson was waist high in a river in northern New Mexico when his fly-fishing guide told him about the heist. Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins-some collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwins, Alfred Russel Wallace, whod risked everything to gather them-and escaped into the darkness. Home to one of the largest ornithological collections in the world, the Tring museum was full of rare bird specimens whose gorgeous feathers were worth staggering amounts of money to the men who shared Edwins obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at Londons Royal Academy of Music, twenty-year-old American flautist Edwin Rist boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History. Christian Science Monitor From the author of The Fishermen and the Dragon, a rollicking true-crime adventure and a captivating journey into an underground world of fanatical fly-tiers and plume peddlers, for readers of The Stranger in the Woods, The Lost City of Z, and The Orchid Thief. Maureen Corrigan, NPRs Fresh Air One of the most peculiar and memorable true-crime books ever. Though its non-fiction, The Feather Thief contains many of the elements of a classic thriller.

Book Synopsis As heard on NPRs This American Life Absorbing. About the Book Includes A Penguin readers guide to the Feather Thief (12 pages).

The feather thief review