The book arrived a few days later, and I started reading and was immediately sucked into the story. I immediately ordered the book and paid 11 UK£ or about 15 US$ for it new in spite of it being listed most places for its cover price, 27 US$. The cover notes confirmed my notion: '.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.' The image on the cover is of a dozen or so colorful feathers, parrot most likely, and certainly something I have seen on pictures of many classic flies, on a number of framed full dressed flies and not least in the tying material drawers of several die-hard classic salmon fly tyers. I also recognized another aspect of the subject: fly-tying. Being a trained biologist, and having spent a fair amount of time in the hallways of the Zoological Museum in Copenhagen while writing a (yet unfinished) thesis, the term 'Natural History Heist' tickled something in me. The subtitle reads 'Beauty, Obsession, and the Natural History Heist of the Century' written on a tag like the ones used for biological field samples. The book called my name the moment I saw its cover. This book is in some ways in the crime genre, but written in the more contemporary 'true crime' style, where an author unravels the behavior, background, actions, environment and mind of a criminal. The template is very much the same, and the writing often mediocre. I'm not a huge fan of the latter two genres, mainly because many crime and thriller novels simply aren't good. Second on my list is science fiction, third is various non-fiction (often scientific) books and somewhere around fourth or fifth comes crime and thrillers. My major book consumption is within fly fishing and fly tying.

The feather thief