My dog is a German wirehaired pointer. He's considered a "versatile" dog. His registered name is Half-fast Bandit, but goes by Bandit, and he looks a lot like Prussian King Wilhelm I. Now that he is too old to be a first-rate upland bird dog, he has exhibited his versatility by collecting eastern box turtles from the woods around my house. I find that weird and suspect the turtles do, too.

It turns out, according to Bryan Christy, collection of turtles for fun or profit isn't an unusual pastime. For that matter, Christy insinuates that collecting herptiles for fun isn't particularly weird and, done for profit, it has been altogether epidemic. So too, for amphibians and reptiles. His book, The Lizard King: The True Crimes and Passions of the World's Greatest Reptile Smugglers is an eye opener about slimy life forms. Those would be the smugglers of rare and endangered snakes, turtles, lizards and whatever else shows up on well-intentioned CITES lists that serve to keep the bad guys apprised of what's really valuable.

The Lizard King, all 256 pages, details the amazingly busy and lucrative marketing of herps, amphibians and reptiles and exposes the trade's slimy underbelly. It tells two main, remarkable stories. First is the life and times of the Lizard King?actually the Lizard King family, the Van Nostrands of the Hollywood, Florida business Reptiles First, which supplied all manner of crawling things to zoos, pet stores and a select clientele interested in particularly illegal crawling things. How they managed to create a virtual empire, legal and not, is part of that first story, and it is fascinating, not only because of their ingenuity, but because theirs was a classic American tale of success driven by greed and piloted by arrogance.

The other story is the daunting efforts of U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service Special Agent Chip Bepler, who, with the help of others, endeavored to bring the principal Lizard King to justice and to find justice for the tens of thousands of smuggled turtles, snakes, lizards and other exotic critters that didn't survive suffocating confinement en route to and through U.S. customs. Bepler's heroic sacrifices and his tenacity also are fascinating and make this truly a true crime book, as the subtitle reveals, and it is a really good one.

If I have overused the adjective fascinating, that's because I previously had no idea of the measure of the trade and crime. I had no idea of the extent of herptile, etc., smuggling and that it was vastly less dangerous (competitively and punitively) and much more lucrative than drug smuggling. I had no idea that "captive bred" was the simple, convenient and virtually unassailable pathway around CITES protections for rare and endangered animals?a pathway aided and abetted by certain high-ranking foreign officials with responsibility for protecting their national, natural treasures. I had no idea the breeding of snakes, such as albino Burmese pythons, is a substantial industry, as is the sale of freeze-dried mice. I had no idea that the thin green line policing the importation of exotics hasn't been thin; it's been all but transparent, despite the efforts of the few and far-between special agents. Apparently, American's righteous indignation about illegal aliens doesn't apply seriously to things with scales and shells, regardless or in spite of national and international laws. It seems that humane and ethical treatment applies mostly to animals not inclined to constrict or poison its food or foes. Not least of all, I had no idea that there are so many people (and at least one German wirehaired pointer) in the United States and worldwide who are enamored of herptiles, etc., much less so infatuated as to risk or even court felonies to collect them. I have long suspected that fish and birds are treasured by some people to a freaky extent, but snakes, lizards, turtles and the like?well, color me na?ve.

Maybe if I hadn't been quite so taken aback by the fact and prevalence of the smuggling, this book won't have had such allure. But it did. And it is really well written. What's more, I gained appreciation for what an author endures to craft such a work. In the course of researching its international intrigues, Christy was bitten between the eyes by a python, chased by an alligator, sprayed by a bird-eating tarantula and targeted by an ejaculating tiger. This can be attributed to literary verve or the fact that the author graduated from Penn State (don't embrace, provoke, or become romantically attached to the subject victims in crime writing, Bryan?Nonfiction 101).

The Lizard King, published in 2008 by Grand Central Publishing, is available in hardcover for $27.99 or softcover for $24.99 at www.hachettebookgroup.com. It's indeed worth reading.? ?