Like her celebrated Bel Canto, this new novel is set in South America, in this case, somewhere in the Amazonian jungles of Brazil. It opens in Eden Prairie, Minnesota, where Dr. Marina Singh learns, through a distressingly curt and incomplete note from Dr. Anneck Swenson, that her office mate and fellow researcher, Anders Eckman, has died and been hastily buried at the outpost in the Amazon where the secretive Swenson is investigating a promising new fertility drug. He had been sent out by the pharmacology lab’s head, Mr. Fox, to find out what exactly is going on, since Dr. Swenson refuses answer questions by phone or computer – and is, in fact, not revealing exactly where she is doing her work. When he fails to return, Marina, who is in a romantic relationship with Mr. Fox, is sent to complete his mission and bring back anything belonging to him to his wife and three young sons. She also has an earlier connection to Dr. Swenson, who was her teacher in medical school and is, in part, responsible for Marina fleeing medical practice to the safer field of pharmacology after she committed a traumatizing surgical error. With many echoes of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of darkness, the story follows Marina as she pushes deeper and deeper into both the jungle and the secrets it holds. Although the writing is evocative and the characters well-drawn, there was something about the novel that I found somewhat off-putting and I finished it feeling vaguely disappointed. Perhaps the Heart of darkness theme is a bit forced, and the symbolic names (Eden Prairie, a real place, is clearly Eden to Marina, who loves its flat, wide-open spaces, so unlike the smothering embrace of the jungle) got to be a bit much. 368 pp.
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