THE FALCON THIEF

A rollicking true-crime adventure about a scoundrel who trades in rare birds and their eggs - and the wildlife detective determined to stop him.

On May 3, 2010, a South African named Jeffrey Lendrum was apprehended at Britain's Birmingham International Airport with a suspicious parcel strapped to his chest. 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's 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 nefarious predators of our time.

From the volcanoes of Chile's Tierra Del Fuego to Zimbabwe's Maboto National Park, and from the frigid tundra near the Arctic Circle to luxurious aviaries in the deserts of Dubai, The Falcon Thief takes readers in pursuit of a man who's cheerful, reckless, charming, arrogant, and gripped by a destructive compulsion to make the most beautiful creatures in nature his own. It's a story that's one part true crime, one part epic adventure - and wholly captivating all the way to the end.

Joshua Hammer was born in New York and graduated from Princeton University with a cum laude degree in English literature. He joined the staff of Newsweek as a business and media writer in 1988, and between 1992 and 2006 served as a bureau chief and correspondent-at-large on five continents. Hammer is now a contributing editor to Smithsonian and Outside, a frequent contributor to the New York Review of Books, and has written for publications including the New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, Vanity Fair, the Condé Nast Traveler, the Atlantic Monthly, and the Atavist. He is the author of three non-fiction books and has won numerous journalism awards. Since 2007 he has been based in Berlin, Germany, and continues to travel widely around the world.