Divergent Rays • read

Absolutely bonkers story! It centers on a hobby craze that started in the Victorian era, salmon fly tying but using exotic feathers. A current day young practitioner of that hobby helped himself to hundreds of irreplaceable bird specimens from a museum in order to pay for, among other things, a golden flute. He was eventually arrested and stood trial, only to get out of the charges by having a psychologist (who was the cousin of Sacha Baron Cohen - yes, Borat!) diagnose the thief as autistic and therefore in need of therapy instead of prison time. Not all of the bird specimens were recovered and the book's author searches the fly tying world to try and find out where they were and also eventually gets an interview with the thief, himself.