“Ben Fountain writes in the great tradition of such predecessors as Joseph Conrad, Graham Green, Robert Stone and Russell Banks: richly detailed portraits of individuals whose public and private lives conjoin, often with tragic results. His work, like theirs, is fundamentally moral, even visionary; saturated with irony, yet not devoid of sympathy. Devil Makes Three is a monumental achievement spanning, not historical time, but the consequences of history impinging upon the present. Is there a spiritual connection, a subterranean causality, between the nightmare of political chaos, anarchy and bloodshed in Haiti, and the death of a once-beautiful undersea reef turned “bleached cadaver gray…(like) Chernobyl”; a connection between naive American entrepreneurs, clandestine CIA operatives, and “zombification” of a people—“malnutrition, lead poisoning, physical or emotional abuse”? Fountain’s obvious love for his subject is not qualified by a failure to fully engage its complexities and compromises. Devil Makes Three is evocative too of such knowledgeable thrillers as those of John Le Carre, combining social criticism, political psychodrama, and, not least, subplots of romantic intrigue. Ben Fountain illuminates the extraordinary darkness, violence, and intrigue of Haiti, exhibiting not only a telling grasp of the powerful forces that erupt into chaos, but the psychological and emotional costs of individuals swept up in turmoil beyond their control and comprehension. This is a remarkable work of immense ambition and substance; it is expansive, yet lyric; a feat of geopolitical history. Ben Fountain’s characters are never caricatures but reflections of individuals as nuanced, ambivalent, guiltily innocent or innocently guilty as ourselves.”