Night Birds, Winnipeg author Margaret Sweatman’s seventh novel, is a literary thriller. It begins with a mining disaster in Romania: an open-pit gold mine and its cyanide-laced tailing basin are pummelled with heavy rains, which sends deadly slurry down the mountain.

Tellingly, when Peter Zugravi, the mine owner, hears of the disaster, he phones first his accountant, then his lawyer.

Gold mines feature in Night Birds – in Burkina Faso, Romania, Finland. Sweatman says, “Mining at Roșia Montana˘, Romania, has been going on since the beginning of the first millennium. This collusion of forces, and the epic time span, inspired Night Birds. The novel is cast in the near future. Now the climate crisis is gathering force, upending us, a judgment on our blindness and aggression.”

Gold brings greed. Farrar, a foundry owner, has benefited from the practice of hawala, an ancient way of transferring money between people, without banks. The primary link is trust, and Farrar never asks the question: Where does the money come from?

“If hawala is corrupted, it can be a method for money laundering,” Sweatman explains. “The extenuation of trust between the characters is personal and fragile. The breach of trust is criminal on one level. More intimately, characters betray their loved ones, caught up in a fatal current.”

The concept of tocado, “deep time sickness,” is important in Night Birds. It is a bedrock disruption of the body and soul. Those who have been touched, like Farrar’s wife Clio, have, as Sweatman explains, “unwillingly gained the almost inhuman knowledge that comes from being plunged into a deep geological past. This impersonal knowledge radically alters a person’s sense of identity.”

One of the main characters, Mark, the financier who arranges Farrar’s loans, is an ambiguous impersonal figure. It is he who suggests that Farrar invest in the Romanian mine, but also he who provides a sanctuary at Five Towers for several people connected to those who have angered Zugravi.

All the characters are drawn with such subtlety that their true motivations only slowly become evident. And often their true motivations are not known to themselves.

Sweatman’s research was meticulous. “When I first began research for this novel, I pawed through handbooks on rocks and minerals and tried to understand books about geology,” she says. “I found wonderful field guides and read brilliantly written and researched books. This material is marvellous. The world is a marvel.

“And thanks to the miracle of YouTube, we can watch obsessive blacksmiths and metallurgists handling molten metal in their garages.”

The title connects to various levels of the novel, Sweatman says. “The characters in my novel have an abstract affinity with birds that sing and hunt at night. Nighthawks, whippoorwills, owls, loons – I love their acute hearing, their night vision, their mystery.

“Much of the action of this novel is at night, in darkness, as in a mine. The story’s elements are underground – money laundering and mining – and in the psyche, the dreaming mind, the impulses that might not surface into full cognition. The characters are private people, they keep secrets.”