Devil makes three

The violent coup ousting popular Haitian president Jean Aristide in 1991 proves personally troublesome for American ex-pat Matt and his Haitian best friend and business partner, Alix, since they sank everything into a tourist-magnet scuba business that is quickly destroyed by militant forces. Now Alix has a plan to get them back on track--treasure hunting! Haiti's waters are notorious burial grounds for legendary gold-bearing vessels, a notion that piques the interest of both a super-yacht-owning billionaire and a Haitian general searching for the wreck of Columbus' Santa Maria. Such attention is dangerous, according to Alix's sister, Misha, and Alix's lover, CIA operative Shelly (real name Audrey). They fear that the civil, governmental, and military unrest ravaging the country could put the men in jeopardy, jail, or the morgue. Highly acclaimed Fountain (Billy Lynn's Halftime Walk, 2012) returns to fiction with this bold tale, deftly using Haiti's distinctive lingo and dialect. Deeply moved by the country's unfathomable poverty, suffocating lushness, ancient spirituality, moral dilemmas, and rampant criminality, Fountain brings a Graham Greene-like approach to Haiti's vagaries and wonders. This sweeping, bracing, and sobering exploration of the troubled island nation's perennial, heartbreaking turmoil and geopolitical complications is topical yet timeless, elaborate and nuanced, laden with political intrigue and immersed in cultural rituals.

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.)

Natives, expats, and interlopers navigate the aftermath of Haiti's violent 1991 coup. Fountain's second novel, following the National Book Critics Circle Award--winning Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk (2012), opens shortly after the deposition of Jean-Bertrand Aristide by the Caribbean nation's military leaders. Matt Amaker, an American running a scuba-diving business for tourists, hopes the matter will soon blow over; but Audrey O'Donnell, a CIA agent managing money funneled into Haiti by the U.S. government, has a better glimpse of how upended the country is, to the point of getting a perverse thrill from it ("here was the world in miniature, a hothouse geopolitical lab where trends, functions, and methods were stripped bare for the interested student to view"); and Misha, a native Haitian and sister of Matt's business partner, becomes a witness to the depths of the coup's violence when she works as a clerk in a hospital struggling to keep up with the flood of victims. Desperate to keep working, Matt pursues a treasure-hunting scheme, heading to a quiet shore to find some cannons and other potentially lucrative remnants of a Spanish galleon. In the process, he digs up further trouble--and a metaphor for the long history of colonialist abuses that, Fountain suggests, keep driving Haiti to the brink. Fountain has made dozens of trips to Haiti, which fueled half the stories in his superb 2006 debut, Brief Encounters With Che Guevara (and made him an exemplar of Malcolm Gladwell's "10,000 hours" rule for mastery); his grasp of the country's folklore and history is worked satisfyingly deep into this book's pages. But the execution can be disappointingly flat in comparison to other white-man-in-a-foreign-land practitioners like Paul Theroux, Norman Rush, Graham Greene, and Russell Banks; not quite a thriller about treasure-seeking nor a study of spycraft nor realist historical fiction, the book displays Fountain's smarts but also meanders and lectures. A fine-grained, if at times overly upholstered tale of humanitarian and political tragedy. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.