Few books about fly fishing penetrate the mainstream consciousness. Even fewer become significant—the average non-fishing reader could name three or four fly fishing stories at most (all fiction). The Feather Thief is the very rare book about fly-fishing to carry real cross-over appeal.

Writing in the same familiar investigative style as John Vaillant’s The Tiger or Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild, Feather Thief author Kirk W. Johnson dives deep; deep into the history of 19th century “natural philosophers” like Charles Darwin and his erstwhile rival Alfred Russell Wallace, and even deeper into the modern-day true crime committed by a peculiar professional flautist and expert fly dresser named Edwin Rist.

Rist, you see, fell hard for the quixotic appeal of full-dress Victorian salmon fly tying. This niche of a niche specializes in recreating the flies of yore; the flies of the British Empire, to be exact. With a little Blue Chatterer feather here, a plume from a Bird of Paradise there, Victorian salmon flies are literally dressed to impress. These flies were tied less to fool Atlantic Salmon than to be admired by the British plutocrats and industrialists who pursued them. Today’s fly dressers play that same game of one-upmanship, striving to impress each other with feathers from birds registered on Endangered Species lists worldwide.

Or, in the fascinating case of Edwin Rist, simply using feathers from birds hundreds of years dead. Rist, longing for materials he was unable to afford, staged a break-in into a sleepy outpost of the British Museum system. By shattering a window and slipping through the halls with a rolling suitcase, this professional musician improbably made off with millions of dollars worth of rare skins. And not just any skins; the birds Rist stole were the very same collected by Alfred Russell Wallace as he raced to understand the mechanisms that Darwin was simultaneously describing in On the Origin of the Species. Short of Darwin’s own finches, there are no more historically-significant pelts on the planet.

Wallace handles all of this material with aplomb. The first two thirds of the book will have you racing through the pages, while the last third deals with the tantalizing possibility that Rist may not have acted alone. Taking personal risks that at times border on the comical—including a face to face meeting with Rist with a hidden, armed guard nearby—Wallace deftly weaves a compelling narrative of crime, class envy, obsession, and the beautiful, incandescent allure of the well-tied fly.