The Falcon Thief

Author: Joshua Hammer
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
ISBN: 150119190X
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Book Description
A “well-written, engaging detective story” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review) 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 “vivid tale of obsession and international derring-do” (Publishers Weekly), 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. “Masterfully constructed” (The New York Times) and “entertaining and illuminating” (The Washington Post), The Falcon Thief will whisk you away 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.

The Highland Falcon Thief: Adventures on Trains #1

Author: M. G. Leonard
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
ISBN: 1250222907
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
In The Highland Falcon Thief: Adventures on Trains #1, a middle-grade series starter from MG Leonard and Sam Sedgman, a young boy is swept up in an investigation to uncover the perpetrator of a jewel theft. When eleven-year-old Harrison "Hal" Beck is forced to accompany his travel-writer uncle on the last journey of a royal train, he expects a boring trip spent away from video games and children his age. But then Hal spots a girl who should not be on board, and he quickly makes friends with the stowaway, Lenny. Things get even more interesting when the royal prince and princess board for the last leg of the journey—because the princess's diamond necklace is soon stolen and replaced with a fake! Suspicion falls on the one person who isn't supposed to be there: Lenny. It's up to Hal, his keen observation, and his skill as a budding sketch artist to uncover the real jewel thief, clear his friend's name, and return the diamond necklace before The Highland Falcon makes its last stop.

Murder on the Safari Star: Adventures on Trains #3

Author: M. G. Leonard
Publisher: Feiwel & Friends
ISBN: 125022294X
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 272

Book Description
In this third book of the middle-grade Adventures on Trains series by M. G. Leonard and Sam Sedgman, amateur sleuth Hal Beck travels to South Africa with his uncle to a ride a famous train...and stumbles onto a murder mystery! Following his adventure on the California Comet, artist and amateur sleuth Hal Beck is looking forward to another railway journey with Nat, his journalist uncle—this time riding the historic Safari Star through South Africa. Then the already eventful journey becomes even more so when one of their fellow passengers dies on board! Accident . . . or murder? With help from a new friend, Winston (and his mongoose, Chipo), Hal is determined to figure out if a murder has really taken place and, if so, who among a long list of suspects is the killer—all before the Safari Star arrives at its final destination.

The Feather Thief

Author: Kirk Wallace Johnson
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101981628
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
As heard on NPR's This American Life “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. On a cool June evening in 2009, after performing a concert at London's 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. 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 Edwin's obsession: the Victorian art of salmon fly-tying. Once inside the museum, the champion fly-tier grabbed hundreds of bird skins—some 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 the beauty of nature.

The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu

Author: Joshua Hammer
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476777438
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
**New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice** To save ancient Arabic texts from Al Qaeda, a band of librarians pulls off a brazen heist worthy of Ocean’s Eleven in this “fast-paced narrative that is…part intellectual history, part geopolitical tract, and part out-and-out thriller” (The Washington Post) from the author of The Falcon Thief. In the 1980s, a young adventurer and collector for a government library, Abdel Kader Haidara, journeyed across the Sahara Desert and along the Niger River, tracking down and salvaging tens of thousands of ancient Islamic and secular manuscripts that were crumbling in the trunks of desert shepherds. His goal: preserve this crucial part of the world’s patrimony in a gorgeous library. But then Al Qaeda showed up at the door. “Part history, part scholarly adventure story, and part journalist survey…Joshua Hammer writes with verve and expertise” (The New York Times Book Review) about how Haidara, a mild-mannered archivist from the legendary city of Timbuktu, became one of the world’s greatest smugglers by saving the texts from sure destruction. With bravery and patience, Haidara organized a dangerous operation to sneak all 350,000 volumes out of the city to the safety of southern Mali. His heroic heist “has all the elements of a classic adventure novel” (The Seattle Times), and is a reminder that ordinary citizens often do the most to protect the beauty of their culture. His the story is one of a man who, through extreme circumstances, discovered his higher calling and was changed forever by it.

Falcon in the Glass

Author: Susan Fletcher
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1442429917
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 336

Book Description
"Eleven-year-old Renzo must teach himself to blow glass with the help of a girl who has a mysterious connection to her falcon"--

The Mirror Thief

Author: Martin Seay
Publisher: Melville House
ISBN: 1612195156
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 594

Book Description
A New York Times NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR An NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A Publishers Weekly BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR A globetrotting, time-bending, wildly entertaining masterpiece hailed by the New York Times Book Review as "Audaciously well written … the book I was raving about to my friends before I'd even finished it." Set in three different eras, and in three different locations—all, coincidentally, named Venice—this “startling, beautiful gem of a book” (NPR) calls to mind David Mitchell and Umberto Eco in its mix of entertainment and literary bravado. The core story is set in sixteenth-century Venice, where, on the island of Murano, the famed makers of Venetian glass were perfecting one of the old world's most wondrous inventions: the mirror. An object of glittering yet fearful fascination—was it reflecting simple reality, or something more spiritually revealing?—the Venetian mirrors were state-of-the-art technology, subject to industrial espionage by desirous sultans and royals world-wide. Thus, for the skilled craftsmen that made them, any attempt to leave the island—to steal the technology—was a crime punishable by death. One man, however—a world-weary war hero with nothing to lose—has a scheme he thinks will allow him to outwit the city's terrifying enforcers of the edict, the ominous Council of Ten . . . Meanwhile, in two other Venices—Venice Beach, California, circa 1958, and the Venice casino in Las Vegas, circa today—two other schemers launch similarly dangerous plans to get away with a secret . . . All three stories weave together into a spell-binding tour de force that is impossible to put down—an old-fashioned, stay-up-all-night novel that, in the end, returns the reader to a stunning conclusion in the original Venice . . . and the bedazzled sense of having read a truly original and thrilling work of art.

The Flightless Falcon

Author: Mickey Zucker Reichert
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0756400007
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 319

Book Description
A down-on-his-luck ex-miner is sentenced to prison after he's caught stealing to feed his family. When Tamison's sentence is finished, he discovers his family has been kidnapped. Determined to rescue them, Tamison realizes he can't do it alone--and to break into a seemingly impenetrable city, he needs the help of three unlikely allies: a guard, a thief, and a fortune-teller.

Danger at Dead Man's Pass

Author: M. G. Leonard
Publisher: Macmillan Children's Books
ISBN: 1760988693
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 251

Book Description
Embark on a thrilling fourth adventure in the bestselling, prize-winning Adventures on Trains series - Danger in Dead Man's Pass, from M. G. Leonard and Sam Sedgman, as Harrison Beck investigates an ancient family curse high in the German mountains. Illustrated in black-and-white throughout by Elisa Paganelli. A mysterious letter from an old friend asks Hal and Uncle Nat to help investigate a spooky supernatural mystery. Legend has it the Kratzensteins, a family of rich and powerful railway tycoons, are cursed, but there is no such thing as a curse, is there . . .? Hal and Nat take the night train to Berlin and go undercover. From a creaking old house at the foot of the Harz mountains, they take the Kratzenstein family's funeral train to the peak of the Brocken Mountain. Can Hal uncover the secrets of the Brocken railway and the family curse before disaster strikes? Praise for the Series: 'A high-speed train journey worth catching . . .The best yet.' The Times on Murder on the Safari Star 'Like Murder on the Orient Express but better!' Frank Cottrell-Boyce on The Highland Falcon Thief 'A first class choo-choo-dunnit!' David Solomons on Kidnap on the California Comet

The Eye of the Falcon (Gods and Warriors Book 3)

Author: Michelle Paver
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 014197043X
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Book Description
'If an Outsider wields the blade, the House of Koronos burns...' An endless winter. A plague-haunted land. A dying people. Winter has been colder than anyone can remember - and there is no spring. The terrible eruption of Thalakrea has shrouded the sky in ash and blotted out the Sun. The winds of Fate bring Hylas to the island of Keftiu. He is desperate to find his friends: Pirra the daughter of the High Priestess and Havoc the lion cub. But Keftiu has suffered more than anywhere from the fury of the gods, and the once-prosperous island has been ravaged by cold, famine and plague. As Hylas sets off alone, he is tormented by the fear that Pirra and Havoc may not have survived the winter... 'Electrifying' - Independent on Sunday 'The reader's attention is caught from the first line...spellbinding' - Telegraph 'Set to become another children's classic' - Books for Keeps Michelle Paver was born in Malawi in 1960 and moved to England when she was three. After gaining a degree in biochemistry from Oxford, she became a partner in a City law firm, but gave that up to write full-time. To research her stories about animals and the distant past, she has travelled in the Arctic, the Mediterranean and Egypt, swum with dolphins and killer whales, and encountered bears, boars and wolves. She is the author of the internationally bestselling Chronicles of Ancient Darkness, the final book of which won the 2010 Guardian Children's Fiction Prize.