David Grann's quest to find out what happened to the British explorer Colonel Percy Fawcett began as a 2005 New Yorker article and last year was expanded into a compelling non-fiction book. (It's also due to be made into a film starring Brad Pitt.) Fawcett was an explorer and cartographer of the intrepid Victorian school. Fearless and determined, he made a series of trips, beginning in 1906, deep into the South American interior to map out uncharted territory for the Royal Geographical Society.

At the time, even among the scientific community, the Amazon was viewed as an area of impenetrable mystery and lethal danger. Along with Antarctica, it remained beyond the reach of all but a handful of adventurers, of whom Fawcett was the most celebrated. His exploits were reported in newspapers around the world, and inspired Arthur Conan Doyle to write The Lost World.

Fawcett was convinced that the Amazon had once supported a sophisticated civilisation. He had read the tales of early Conquistadors, the El Dorado myths that had drawn men to their deaths in doomed pursuit of hidden riches. But each excursion he made led him to believe that a lost city he codenamed Z existed somewhere farther into the jungle.

In 1925, amid a great flurry of media attention, he, his young son, Jack, and Jack's schoolfriend, Raleigh Rimell, set off to locate Z. The group disappeared and were never heard from again.

Grann cleverly knits together Fawcett's story with his own attempts to find Z, and sets both narratives against the socio-geographical debate over whether the Amazon is and always was a "counterfeit paradise", ill-suited to large human populations.

Although sympathetic to Amazonian natives, Fawcett was a product of an imperialist culture and he believed his elusive Z was created by a lost tribe of Europeans. It won't lessen the vivid pleasures of this ripping yarn to note that, while Grann doesn't succeed in all his objectives, he learns that an indigenous civilisation close to the Brazilian-Bolivian border may well have built cities almost a thousand years ago  nor to say that Fawcett was very close to their buried remains when he vanished.