About this item
A rollicking 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 globetrotting smuggler who spent two decades capturing endangered raptors for royals in the United Arab Emirates - where falcon races have multimillion-dollar purses and a champion bird might just be worth risking prison for - and Detective Andy McWilliam of the United Kingdom's National Wildlife Crime Unit, who's determined to protect the world's birds of prey from one of the most irrepressible predators of our time. 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. It's a story that's part true-crime narrative, part epic adventure - and wholly unputdownable until the very last page.
About the Author
Joshua Hammer was born in New York and educated at Horace Mann and Princeton University, graduating with a BA in English literature. In 1988 he joined Newsweek Magazine as a business and media writer, transitioning to the magazine's foreign correspondent corps in 1992. Hammer served, successively, as bureau chief in Nairobi, Buenos Aires, Los Angeles, Berlin, Jerusalem, and Cape Town, and also was the magazine's Correspondent at Large in 2005 and 2006. He was a Nieman Fellow at Harvard University in the 2004-2005 academic year. Since leaving Newsweek in 2006 Hammer has been an independent foreign correspondent, a contributing editor at Smithsonian Magazine and Outside, and a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, GQ, the New York Times Magazine, and other US publications. He was a finalist for the National Magazine Award in reporting in 2003, and won the award, for his writing about the Ebola crisis in West Africa, in 2016. He is the author of 5 non-fiction books, including the New York Times bestseller, "The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu," which was published by Simon & Schuster in April 2016. Hammer is currently based in Berlin.