Devil Makes Three

Fountain’s first novel since his bestselling Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk is a sprawling, fierce exploration of violence and corruption in the Caribbean. In 1991, when Haitian President Jean-Bertrand Aristide is deposed by a military junta, American expat Matt Amaker and his Haitian partner, Alix Variel, see their scuba diving tourist business dry up and turn to recovering brass cannons from a shipwrecked conquistador galleon. Alix’s occasional lover, Audrey O’Donnell, is an undercover CIA agent helping to expedite the smuggling of arms into the country. Meanwhile, Matt’s lover, Misha (who is also Alix’s sister), forgoes her education at Brown in order to work as a clerk at an overburdened medical clinic in Port-au-Prince, which is short of drugs due to the American embargo. Matt and Alix are arrested by the new government as terrorists and thrown into jail. But corrupt Gen. Romeo Concers shows Matt a way out by underwriting his dive to locate the remains of Columbus’s flagship, the Santa Maria. With differing and often conflicting agendas, Matt, Audrey, and Misha end up on a collision course as personal morality collides with political expediency. Through these—and other—well-wrought characters, Fountain dramatically captures the ever-shifting nature of Haitian politics. The result reads like an update of Hemingway’s To Have and Have Not, with some of the moral heft of Robert Stone’s A Flag for Sunrise. Readers of international thrillers should pounce. (Sept.)