John Laroche is a sharply handsome guy, in spite of the fact that he is missing all his teeth, has the posture of al dente spaghetti and the nervous intensity of someone who wins a lot of video games. He is also an orchid thief, who, along with three Seminole Indians, was arrested with rare orchids they had stolen out of a place called the Fakahatchee Strand State Preserve, a wild swamp in South Florida filled with extraordinary plants and trees, including some that don't grow anywhere else in the world.

One of those rare plants is called the ghost orchid, which John Laroche planned on cloning and then selling to impassioned collectors for a small fortune. New Yorker writer Susan Orlean was so fascinated by Laroche -- "the most moral, amoral man I've ever met," she writes -- that she followed him through the swamps and into the eccentric world of Florida's most obsessed plant collectors, a subculture of aristocrats, enthusiasts, and smugglers whose passion for plants is all-consuming. Along the way, Orlean learns the history of orchid collecting, discovers an unusual pattern of plant crimes in Florida, and spends time with Laroche's partners in crime, a tribe of Seminole Indians who are still at war with the United States.

Fascinating, funny, and bizarre, The Orchid Thief is a truly memorable and original work of nonfiction.