In Lesley Krueger’s Drink the Sky, part carefully wrought thriller, part eco-excursion into the heart of darkness, a young Canadian woman struggles with questions of identity against the backdrop of modern Brazil. While her environmentalist husband Todd is in the Amazon, Holly Austen stays with their two sons in Rio, alternately resenting his neglect and revelling in the freedom to pursue her own ambitions. Her dabblings in art evolve and mature as she embraces Brazil’s heat, colour, and lushness, excited by its volatile extremes. Her chosen soulmate for this sojourn is Charles Darwin (“the last word on transience”) who 160-odd years earlier had lived a short distance away. Holly’s elaborate reconstructions of Darwin in Rio inspire her painting and mediate between her and this exotic, alien world.

Then a holiday at a remote tourist camp triggers events that threaten the Austens’ shaky family unit. Todd tries unsuccessfully to confront the owner, Doutor Eduardo, a local eminence with “a thumb in every pie,” about a rumoured clash between an isolated tribe and mining scouts. The Austens’ Canadian experience is of little use in understanding the machinations at play around them, and Darwin ultimately fails as a guide. Holly’s keenest instinct of something amiss is viscerally linked to her children. When an affair briefly blurs this locus, the door to tragedy is opened.

Krueger, now living in Toronto, has a terrific CV as a journalist, essayist, radio producer, and writer of fiction. Like the Austens, she has lived in Vancouver and Rio de Janeiro, and this gives resonance to her depictions of both places. She filters her narrative through Holly’s high-strung, nervy sensibility, a claustrophobic focus that can set the reader’s teeth on edge; our sympathies often shift to her beleaguered husband, surely not what Krueger intends. However, her elegant prose is generally a pleasure to read, and when Krueger ratchets up the tension, we go with her, hearts in mouths. She has intriguing and serious things to say about human nature and the planet.