Devil Makes Three

A Novel

By: Ben Fountain

Narrated by: Ron Butler

Short-listed, Joyce Carol Oates Prize, 2024

One of The Washington Post's 10 Best Audiobooks of 2023

"This searing novel is made more powerful by narrator Ron Butler. He passes from speaker to speaker seamlessly, their personalities distinct, their emotions palpable. This is a perfect union of voice and literature."—The Washington Post

"Fountain's audiobook puts listeners in the events as they unfold, and Butler's voice skillfully captures the complex, intelligent characters and their local and global accents. Listeners hungry for multilayered political drama will find Butler's performance immensely satisfying."—AudioFile (Earphones Award Winner)

From the award-winning, bestselling author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk comes a brilliant and propulsive new novel about greed, power, and American complicity set in Haiti

Haiti, 1991. When a violent coup d’état leads to the fall of President Jean-Bertrand Aristide, American expat Matt Amaker is forced to abandon his idyllic, beachfront scuba business. With the rise of a brutal military dictatorship and an international embargo threatening to destroy even the country’s most powerful players, some are looking to gain an advantage in the chaos–and others are just looking to make it through another day.

Desperate for money—and survival—Matt teams up with his best friend and business partner Alix Variel, the adventurous only son of a socially prominent Haitian family. They set their sights on legendary shipwrecks that have been rumored to contain priceless treasures off a remote section of Haiti’s southern coast. Their ambition and exploration of these disastrous wrecks come with a cascade of ill-fated incidents—one that involves Misha, Alix’s erudite sister, who stumbles onto an arms-trafficking ring masquerading as a U.S. government humanitarian aid office, and rookie CIA case officer Audrey O’Donnell, who finds herself doing clandestine work on an assignment that proves to be more difficult and dubious than she could have possibly imagined.

Devil Makes Three’s depiction of blood politics, the machinations of power, and a country in the midst of upheaval is urgently and insistently resonant. This new novel is sure to cement Ben Fountain’s reputation as one of the twenty-first century’s boldest and most perceptive writers.

A Macmillan Audio production from Flatiron Books.

©2023 Ben Fountain (P)2023 Macmillan Audio

Absorbing and relevant

Ben Fountain has captured the plight of Haiti in his novel of Haitians and foreigners living there and trying to cope with (or profit from) the country's chaos and violence. This is a politically astute and humane account of a certain time that could be anytime in Haiti.

Brilliant Novel about US Policy & its Effects

This is a brilliant novel written as a hybrid, part lost treasure, part spy thriller, part historio-political potboiler & genius-level poetic literature! Truly touching on those affected by US foreign policy on the other side of the stick.
For any fan of Hemingway, Graham Greene, Denis Johnson and even Tom Clancy, this literary gem had me racing to its conclusion!

Ben Fountain's finest work to date

I'm a huge fan of Ben Fountain's previous books. Devil Makes Three is his most ambitious work to date and the product of a writer at the peak of his talents. I gravitate to books that transport me to unfamiliar worlds far from my lived experience, and the Haiti of Fountain's long-awaited second novel is such a fully rendered, thoroughly researched world that I was thrilled to spend time there and sad to leave. All of the characters are incredibly compelling, especially the two main females, and the multiple sub-plots are woven together in a way that makes a fairly complicated plot structure easy to follow, but Haiti, the place and culture, is the richest and most haunting character here. Without being heavy-handed or didactic, Fountain's Haiti at this pivotal moment in its history, feels like a lens through which we can view our own time and place, as well as a completely unique world complicated and enriched by its political machinations, spiritual beliefs, social structures, and language. After this book, I hope to be able to visit Haiti one day and that the Haitian people persevere and triumph over the many burdens of the past, both foreign and domestic, that have held the world's first Black republic, a nation so far ahead if its time in many ways, back for so long. This was an incredibly rewarding book and I highly recommend it.

Specific to the audio version, I thought that Ron Butler was the perfect narrator for this novel. He handles the various voices with aplomb and does a fine job with the Creole words and phrases.

Duress in Haiti

“Devil Makes Three” opened my eyes to the terrible history of Haiti in the early 1990s. Bad things happen to the main characters: Matt, a Florida native with a local scuba business; Alix, his Haitian business partner; Misha, Alix’s altruistic sister, home from studying French at Brown; and Shelly, a cynical but effective CIA agent. They’re glamorous and smart, but they can’t stop the growing chaos and violence as rival factions fight over Haiti’s government.

The book reminded me of books by Robert Stone and even V.S. Naipaul. It’s an adventure tale, a spy novel and a political thriller. The convoluted plot works. Ben Fountain has created believable characters from across Haitian life, rich and poor, from military generals and their wives to thugs, from voodoo priests to a pretty young newscaster. I learned a ton about Haiti and, indirectly, the challenges facing any small developing country. Ron Butler, the narrator, was great.

One question lingers, however. Why is this novel called “Devil Makes Three?” After 20 hours of listening, I have no idea.

Terrific narrator

The author writes patiently and vividly about Haiti in the early 1990s. A vet different depiction of Aristide than I had heard elsewhere. The characters have depth. I enjoyed the narrator’s range of accents, diction, and pace.

Great writer

The characters and historical elements in the book tended to get lost in the clever dialogue. I liked the book. I loved Billy Lynn’s Halftime walk.