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What if you met the Devil and found him to be a strikingly attractive, charming individual who shared all of your interests, fed you well, emphasized the beautiful aspects of nature and life, and even gave you the power to prevent terrible events from occurring?
Jackie Maxwell, a university professor's assistant and budding photographer (wild orchids is her favorite subject), is given such an opportunity upon returning to her mysterious hometown of Cole Creek, North Carolina. Leaving a young man at the altar, Maxwell joins the company of bestselling author Ford Newcombe, whom she meets at a party. Maxwell is a cute, rather forward girl half Newcombe's age, making her the perfect assistant to Newcombe, a portly yet handsome widower who has had far too many female assistants come into his employ hoping to become his lover and wife, rather than his confidant and muse.
It has been too many years since Newcombe published a new book. His writer's block attributed to the tragic death of his wife Pat, the woman who had been his primary inspiration and literary agent. Newcombe has been so Salingeresque in his silence that critics and readers are wondering aloud if it was Pat, rather than Ford, who was the genius behind the fiction.
The journey for Newcombe and Maxwell finally begins when the latter gives the author the inspiration he has sought --- a real-life small town murder mystery involving a woman who had loved the devil. Newcombe has studied hundreds of stories involving hauntings and ghosts, wondering how his art could serve to bring Pat back to life. Yet, in all his recent labors, Newcombe has never seen a nonfiction devil story, especially one that led to the death of the victim --- a murder by a pressing of stones involving numerous killers --- and a dramatic coverup, all in the pure southern town of Cole Creek.
While the premise of the story is tremendous, Deveraux's style and construction leave much to be desired, especially for a New York Times bestselling author. Narrated in alternate chapters by Maxwell and Newcombe, the story is repetitive and the delivery childish, reading like a Nancy Drew mystery or teen novel. He doesn't even begin taking notes for any kind of a story until page 285, leading the reader to believe that he will never tell the "devil story." More frustrating is Newcombe's simple language and frequent statements like: "Even though I'm a writer, I couldn't think of anything adequate to say…" "But there were no words in any language to explain how amazed I was." and "Me, the wordsmith, had not one word in my head that I could think of to say." A writer with nothing to say is worse than a reader with nothing to read, other than a book by a writer with nothing to say.
Meanwhile, Maxwell meets and likes the Devil, paralleling the life of the woman who came before her, the one who was executed for her strange love. Yet, Maxwell's premonitions of the terrible events that she and Newcombe can prevent are so obtuse that they fail to propel the story forward. For example, Maxwell dreams that she sees a car accident involving teens. The teens are laughing, standing near the wrecked car, in total disbelief that they survived unhurt. Then the car explodes, sending their body parts hurling through the air. Later, while out on a drive, Maxwell and Newcombe see the accident and the teens. The author and his assistant jump out of Newcombe's vehicle and pull the teens away from the car just before it blows up. All are saved and one teen becomes a close friend of Maxwell's.
Jay McInerney once told a group of student writers at Skidmore College that authors often make the first chapter of their books the best written and most lucidly constructed. Why? Because some judges of the National Book Awards, the Pulitzer, and other literary awards have been known to read only the first chapter of the hundreds of books they are expected to consider annually. This is not the case with Deveraux, who uses Maxwell to explain how Pulitzer Prize-winning books are made and how these literary books are no different from romance and other genres.
It is Newcombe's crummy childhood, the first chapter of WILD ORCHIDS, in fact, that is the worst chapter in the book. In just 35 pages of elementary text, the following happens: Pat dies of cancer, her mother is killed by a shameless drunk driver, a bully child drowns after torturing a little girl, another girl has her uterus punctured, and a father is jailed while another father decides that his time on Earth is over. After 34 such books, Deveraux has offered another zinger of a great story, poorly told.
--- Reviewed by Brandon Stickney
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