Berlin-based author Joshua Hammer, who wrote the New York Times bestseller “The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World’s Most Precious Manuscripts,” will visit Eagle Harbor Book Company at 3 p.m. Sunday, Feb. 16 to discuss his latest nonfiction saga, “The Falcon Thief: A True Tale of Adventure, Treachery, and the Hunt for the Perfect Bird.”

The event is free and open to the public.

It’s a rollicking true-crime adventure 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 14 rare peregrine falcon eggs snatched from a remote cliffside in Wales.

So begins a tale almost too bizarre to believe, following the parallel lives of a globe-trotting smuggler who spent two decades capturing endangered raptors worth millions of dollars, and Detective Andy McWilliam of the United Kingdom’s National Wildlife Crime Unit, who’s bent on protecting the world’s birds of prey.

“The Falcon Thief” whisks readers 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.

Hammer has written for The New York Times Magazine, GQ, Smithsonian, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, National Geographic, and Outside.

Visit www.eagleharborbooks.com to learn more.