«Amazon Burning» by Victoria Griffith

Amazon Burning is a spectacular debut Young Adult novel, which might also appeal to the older reader. The Author's powerful description of the Amazon rainforest forms the perfect, wildly exotic, backdrop for this extraordinary tale of a young urban woman coming of age in the midst of intense conflict…. When 22-year-old aspiring journalist, Emma Cohen, is forced to flee the comforts of her New York University student life, she manages to persuade her father to give her an internship at his newspaper in Rio de Janeiro. There, Emma is immediately swept into a major news story, and a life-threatening situation, when a famous jungle environmentalist, Milton Silva, is mysteriously murdered. Emma must now enter the Amazon rainforest, with her father, to investigate. She is both awed by the enormity and beauty of the Amazon, yet appalled by its reckless destruction. Moreover, not only will she have to brave its primal world, but also fight to survive the kidnappers, villains, corrupt activists, and indigenous tribes that lay in wait all along the ever-twisting trail of the murder case. Stretched to the brink, it's up to Emma, her father, and a dreamy news photographer, to unravel the mystery and live to tell the tale.