was named one of the best/don’t-miss books of summer 2025 by numerous outlets, including NPR, the Los Angeles Times, Elle, The Millions, and the New York Post, and it received rave reviews elsewhere. The book tells the incredible true story of Roxie Laybourne, a scientist stationed within the Smithsonian who pioneered the field of forensic ornithology and studied feathers recovered from airplane crashes, murder scenes, poaching cases, and other calamities.
Sweeney applied the “Page 99 Test” to The Feather Detective and shared the following:
Page 99 focuses mostly on an amusing exchange that occurred in 1963 between the Smithsonian Institution's Roxie Laybourne, the subject of the biography and the pioneer of forensic ornithology, and a chicken farmer in Newton, Iowa, who claimed to have created a special instrument for quickly determining the sex of just-hatched birds that he named the “Chixexer.” At the time, Roxie was trying to develop methods for determining the sex of Whooping Cranes, which were teetering toward extinction; knowing which cranes were males and which were females was critical to improving breeding efforts. Roxie, who was a leading ornithological expert, reached out to the farmer explaining the circumstances, and received a patronizing response in which the farmer suggested she pay $300 to train under him for a few days, claiming it would save her much time and disappointment. As the page notes, Roxie did not take him up on the offer.Visit Chris Sweeney's website.
I am surprised to say that page 99 encapsulates some of the bigger themes in The Feather Detective and would signal to a single-page reader that this is a book about a woman scientist who is engaged in some unusual bird research and constantly running into social and scientific obstacles. The page makes reference to Roxie’s tireless work ethic and varied caseload: “When Roxie wasn’t practicing her technique at zoos or catching up on feather identifications, she was chasing down leads on bird-sexing techniques like a gumshoe reporter.” And page 99 allows readers to hear a little bit of Roxie’s voice as it directly quotes her letter to the farmer.
Interestingly, Roxie’s foray into Whooping Crane research was an aberration. Ninety-nine percent of Roxie’s cases focused on identifying tiny fragments of feathers from airplane strikes, crime scenes, and other calamities, and that is the main focus of the book. It’s called The Feather Detective, after all, not The Whooping Crane Sexxer. And yet, stripped of context, page 99 stands on its own as a telling snapshot of Roxie while giving readers a sense of the book’s narrative style. The quality of the whole, I think, is revealed in this one page.
--Marshal Zeringue
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