The Falcon Thief is a rollicking true-crime yarn that follows the parallel lives of a veteran wildlife detective from Liverpool, Andy McWilliam, and his quarry, Jeffrey Lendrum, a globetrotting falcon-egg thief and smuggler who raided remote wildernesses for two decades. Both men were amateur ornithologists, athletes, and lovers of the outdoors. Their lives collided at Birmingham Airport in May 2010, when police found, strapped inside socks around Lendrum’s body, fourteen live eggs of the Peregrine Falcon.
McWilliam began digging into Lendrum’s background and unraveled a tale almost too bizarre to be believed. In a quest for the strongest, fastest raptors on earth, he had traveled to the frigid Arctic tundra, the jungles of Sri Lanka, and the volcanoes of Tierra Del Fuego, among other remote nesting locales, ultimately smuggling eggs to a drop-off point in Dubai. Joshua Hammer will unravel Lendrum’s untold saga, delve into the Middle Eastern falcon obsession, and introduce a tight-knit circle of wildlife detectives, led by McWilliam, waging a battle to protect endangered species against environmental predators.
Joshua Hammer was born in New Rochelle, New York, and graduated from Princeton University. He joined the staff of Newsweek in 1988 and, in 1992, moved to Nairobi to become their sub-Saharan Africa Bureau Chief. After 14 years as a bureau chief and correspondent at large on five continents, he left Newsweek in 2006 to return to freelance writing. The Falcon Thief is Hammer’s fourth nonfiction book, and he has won numerous journalism awards, including the 2016 National Magazine Award for Best Reporting. He is based in Berlin, Germany, and continues to travel widely.