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| I'm no Wallace (Charles Darwin) |
On
a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's
Royal Academy of Music, 20-year-old American flutist Edwin Rist
boarded a train for a suburban outpost of the British Museum of Natural History.
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 deadly men who shared
Edwin's obsession: the Victorian sport of salmon fly-tying and -fishing.
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| Beauty, Obsession, the Heist of the Century |
Once inside
the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins.
Some of them had been
collected 150 years earlier by a contemporary of Darwin's, Alfred Russel Wallace, who'd risked everything to gather them -- and escaped into the
darkness.
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.
He was soon consumed by the strange case of the
feather thief. 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.
The gripping story of a bizarre and shocking
crime, and one man's relentless pursuit of justice, The Feather Thief is also a fascinating exploration of obsession and man's destructive instinct to harvest/steal the beauty of nature. More
“Absorbing...Though it's non-fiction, The Feather Thief contains many of the elements of a classic thriller.”
—Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air
“One of the most peculiar and memorable true-crime books ever.”
—Christian Science Monitor
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.
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