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The Falcon Thief: A True Tale of Adventure, Treachery, and the Hunt for the Perfect Bird
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About This Book
A true-crime adventure about a rogue who trades in rare birds and their eggs—and the wildlife detective determined to stop him.On May 3, 2010, an Irish national named Jeffrey Lendrum was apprehended at Britain's Birmingham International Airport with a suspicious parcel strapped to his stomach. Inside were fourteen rare peregrine falcon eggs snatched from a remote cliffside in Wales. So begins a tale almost too bizarre to believe, following the parallel lives of a globe-trotting smuggler who spent two decades capturing endangered raptors worth millions of dollars as race champions—and Detective Andy McWilliam of the United Kingdom's National Wildlife Crime Unit, who's hell bent on protecting the world's birds of prey. The Falcon Thief whisks readers from the volcanoes of Patagonia to Zimbabwe's Matobo National Park, and from the frigid tundra near the Arctic Circle to luxurious aviaries in the deserts of Dubai, all in pursuit of a man who is reckless, arrogant, and gripped by a destructive compulsion to make the most beautiful creatures in nature his own.
Reviews
"As a work of natural history, The Falcon Thief is only slightly less satisfying ..."
"The worlds of egg-collecting and wildlife crime may be relatively esoteric, but Hammer crafts a decent thriller out of his material, largely by making much of Lendrum's feats of derring-do: abseiling down Patagonian cliff faces, dangling from helicopters in Canada and the like."
"Hammer's chronicle is a captivating and surprising read with just the right touch of suspense and mystery."
"His writing style is gripping and fast-paced, but never short on facts and accuracy ..."
"one thinks of Truman Capote, who elaborated on a tiny news story about the killing of a Kansas farm family, turning that grim tragedy into the seminal feat of reportage In Cold Blood...This is very much what Hammer is after in The Falcon Thief, which can sometimes read like the treatment for a James Bond movie ..."
"The problem with a book that focuses on a man who uploads videos of himself to YouTube taunting an Egyptian cobra, or who is accused of turning up the heat on an incubator full of live eggs to destroy evidence, is that it is impossible to feel empathy for Lendrum."
"Hammer paints a vivid portrait of the thrill of the chase and the long-term relationship between criminal and police officer—both of them smart and daring, neither of them willing to give up."
"The book's ultimate concern isn't with the legal case, but with understanding the roots of Lendrum's fixation on falcons, and it's here where Hammer arguably falls short."
"the author beautifully renders this tale 'of human obsession and nature's fragility, of man's perpetual insistence on imposing his will upon the wildness of our world, and of the tiny handful of investigators, most unrecognized, working to safeguard the environment's bounty and wonder.' A sleek, winning nonfiction thriller."
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