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A SIMPLE PLAN
by Scott Smith ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 7, 1993
Think of a backwater James M. Cain, or a contemporary midwestern Unforgiven—and don't think about getting any sleep...
A fairy-tale windfall blasts the lives of two brothers, determined to do whatever it takes to hold onto the money, in Scott's electrifying first novel.
On their way to visit their parents' graves in rural Ohio, Hank Mitchell and his brother Jacob, together with Jacob's no-account pal Lou, find a downed plane, a dead pilot, and four million dollars. After briefly considering turning the money over to the authorities, they decide to let Hank keep it for six months to see whether anybody comes looking for it—believing in their innocence that if nobody does, they'll be safe in spending it. But the very next day, when Hank and Jacob are back at the plane to make sure they haven't left any traces of their presence, they're forced to kill a witness to their discovery. When Lou finds out and begins to blackmail Hank for advances on his share of the loot, Hank's surprisingly resourceful wife Sarah comes up with a scheme to shut his mouth—a scheme that ends, inevitably, in more violence, as Hank keeps killing to protect his family's stake in the American dream, the secrets of his earlier murders, and his sense of himself as normal ``despite everything I've done that might make it seem otherwise.'' By the time the horrific plot has wound down, nine people have died, with more deaths (the Mitchell parents, seven victims in a Detroit kidnapping) hanging heavily over the story. Yet Smith infuses each new twist of violence with shocks of unexpected pity, as Hank, devastated by the killing, keeps drifting back to the rationale he and Sarah share: He had to do it, it wasn't his fault. An eerily flat confessional whose horror is only deepened by its flashes of tenderness.
Pub Date: Sept. 7, 1993
ISBN: 0-679-41985-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1993
THRILLER | GENERAL & DOMESTIC THRILLER | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE
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New York Times Bestseller
by Max Brooks ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 16, 2020
A tasty, if not always tasteful, tale of supernatural mayhem that fans of King and Crichton alike will enjoy.
Are we not men? We are—well, ask Bigfoot, as Brooks does in this delightful yarn, following on his bestseller World War Z (2006).
A zombie apocalypse is one thing. A volcanic eruption is quite another, for, as the journalist who does a framing voice-over narration for Brooks’ latest puts it, when Mount Rainier popped its cork, “it was the psychological aspect, the hyperbole-fueled hysteria that had ended up killing the most people.” Maybe, but the sasquatches whom the volcano displaced contributed to the statistics, too, if only out of self-defense. Brooks places the epicenter of the Bigfoot war in a high-tech hideaway populated by the kind of people you might find in a Jurassic Park franchise: the schmo who doesn’t know how to do much of anything but tries anyway, the well-intentioned bleeding heart, the know-it-all intellectual who turns out to know the wrong things, the immigrant with a tough backstory and an instinct for survival. Indeed, the novel does double duty as a survival manual, packed full of good advice—for instance, try not to get wounded, for “injury turns you from a giver to a taker. Taking up our resources, our time to care for you.” Brooks presents a case for making room for Bigfoot in the world while peppering his narrative with timely social criticism about bad behavior on the human side of the conflict: The explosion of Rainier might have been better forecast had the president not slashed the budget of the U.S. Geological Survey, leading to “immediate suspension of the National Volcano Early Warning System,” and there’s always someone around looking to monetize the natural disaster and the sasquatch-y onslaught that follows. Brooks is a pro at building suspense even if it plays out in some rather spectacularly yucky episodes, one involving a short spear that takes its name from “the sucking sound of pulling it out of the dead man’s heart and lungs.” Grossness aside, it puts you right there on the scene.
Pub Date: June 16, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-9848-2678-7
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Del Rey/Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Feb. 9, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
GENERAL SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY | GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SCIENCE FICTION
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PRETTY GIRLS
by Karin Slaughter ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 29, 2015
Slaughter (Cop Town, 2014, etc.) is so uncompromising in following her blood trails to the darkest places imaginable that...
Twenty-four years after a traumatic disappearance tore a Georgia family apart, Slaughter’s scorching stand-alone picks them up and shreds them all over again.
The Carrolls have never been the same since 19-year-old Julia vanished. After years of fruitlessly pestering the police, her veterinarian father, Sam, killed himself; her librarian mother, Helen, still keeps the girl's bedroom untouched, just in case. Julia’s sisters have been equally scarred. Lydia Delgado has sold herself for drugs countless times, though she’s been clean for years now; Claire Scott has just been paroled after knee-capping her tennis partner for a thoughtless remark. The evening that Claire’s ankle bracelet comes off, her architect husband, Paul, is callously murdered before her eyes and, without a moment's letup, she stumbles on a mountainous cache of snuff porn. Paul’s business partner, Adam Quinn, demands information from Claire and threatens her with dire consequences if she doesn’t deliver. The Dunwoody police prove as ineffectual as ever. FBI agent Fred Nolan is more suavely menacing than helpful. So Lydia and Claire, who’ve grown so far apart that they’re virtual strangers, are unwillingly thrown back on each other for help. Once she’s plunged you into this maelstrom, Slaughter shreds your own nerves along with those of the sisters, not simply by a parade of gruesome revelations—though she supplies them in abundance—but by peeling back layer after layer from beloved family members Claire and Lydia thought they knew. The results are harrowing.
Pub Date: Sept. 29, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-06-242905-6
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Morrow/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
GENERAL THRILLER & SUSPENSE | SUSPENSE | THRILLER | SUSPENSE | PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER
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Submitting a book for review, write the editor, you are here:, a simple plan.
- About the Book
It All Seemed So Simple...
Two brothers and their friend stumble upon the wreckage of a plane—the pilot is dead and his duffle bag contains four million dollars in cash. The men agree to hide, keep and share the fortune. But what started off as a simple plan slowly devolves into a gruesome nightmare none of them can control.
A Simple Plan by Scott Smith
- Publication Date: July 5, 2012
- Genres: Thriller
- Paperback: 432 pages
- Publisher: Vintage
- ISBN-10: 0307278271
- ISBN-13: 9780307278272
Reviewed on: 08/02/1993
Genre: Fiction
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A Simple Plan
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1993
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Movie Reviews
Tv/streaming, collections, chaz's journal, great movies, contributors, “a simple plan” isn’t your typical sam raimi movie, and that’s why it’s his best.
Whenever a new Spider-Man movie is released, it is inevitably compared not to the entire MCU but one single superhero film: “ Spider-Man 2 ”. Writer/director Sam Raimi ’s 2004 sequel, the one where Peter Parker ( Tobey Maguire ) battles Doctor Octopus ( Alfred Molina ), was a box office smash and one of the best-reviewed comic-book movies. At the time, “Spider-Man 2” was the pinnacle of comic-book cinema. In his four-star review , Roger Ebert called it “the best superhero movie since the modern genre was launched with ‘Superman.’”
Fans of Raimi’s pre-Parker work weren’t surprised. His career began with a string of cult classics—the “ Evil Dead ” trilogy and “Darkman”—full of his signature sense of humor, hyper-zooms, cheap special effects and copious amounts of blood. His filmography reveals entry after entry of genre pulp featuring characters dealing with life-changing events.
While Raimi’s most well-known variation on that theme might be “Spider-Man 2,” his best is “ A Simple Plan ,” a slow-burning crime drama that opened in a handful of theaters 20 years ago.
A limited release that expanded from December 1998 to January 1999, “A Simple Plan” is Raimi’s most subtle, unstylish movie to date. Bill Paxton stars as Hank, a small-town husband and soon-to-be father who works at a feed store. Luck changes for Hank as he, his brother Jacob ( Billy Bob Thornton ), and their friend Lou ( Brent Briscoe ) find more than $4 million in an airplane that crash-landed in the woods. Small-town good ol’ boys turn into small-town criminals as complications pile onto the trio’s naive plan of keeping the money hidden from authorities.
Such a movie was different than anything Raimi had previously done. In a 1999 interview with Duane Dedek at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel , Raimi said “A Simple Plan” was his first attempt to put the script and acting ahead of his blood-soaked, B-movie style. While “A Simple Plan” underwhelmed at the box office , critics including Ebert called it “one of the year’s best films .” Further validation came when it picked up Oscar nominations for its screenplay (by Scott B. Smith , adapting from his 1993 novel of the same name) and Thornton’s supporting turn.
Raimi should get as much credit, not for “sitting back” as he suggested in that interview, but for using his style to his advantage. “A Simple Plan” is still very much a Sam Raimi production, from Danny Elfman ’s score to use of dissolves; from panic-inducing tension to splatters of blood. However, those tricks aren’t over-exaggerated, nor do they distract.
Within the first 15 minutes of “A Simple Plan,” Raimi establishes the barren, snow-laden setting. The good-intentions-gone-bad theme appears as a fox captures a hen. Raimi juxtaposes the fox’s hunt with the introduction of Hank, a broad, idyllic man who follows the wisdom of his father.
“I remember my father telling me what he thought that it took for a man to be happy,” Hank says. “Simple things, really. A wife he loves, a decent job, friends and neighbors who like and respect him.”
After Hank visits his parents’ grave with Jacob and Lou (a town drunk who would rather piss in the snow than pay his respects), Jacob nearly runs over the fox. Jacob swerves, crashing his truck into a tree. Jacob’s dog chases after the fox, leading the three men to snow-covered plane surrounded by ominous black crows. As Hank enters the plane to further investigate, crows panic, clawing at Hank. A frozen-dead body stumbles off the pilot’s seat, its hardened blood crashing to the floor. After the scurry, Hank comes out of the plane with a couple scratches and a bag full of money.
At each turn in this setup, Raimi jolts the audience with his trademarks—a few zooms, jump scares and a little gore. However, the rest of “A Simple Plan” is rooted in examining the consequences of a literal jackpot falling in these characters’ backyard. As Ebert noted in his review, the advantage Raimi has here is a flawless cast with players who own their roles.
As Hank, Paxton plays the generic family man turned aspiring thief. Hank is a guy with values, spouting lines like, “You work for the American Dream. You don’t steal it.” However, newfound wealth makes Hank determined and manipulative. After finding the money, Hank quickly becomes hellbent on convincing his wife Sarah ( Bridget Fonda ) to go along with his plan. Paxton’s gee-whiz attitude helps sell Hank’s breathless lies. Hank frantically takes control of the situation as each new hiccup arises. No one—not family, Lou, a suspicious neighbor, the town sheriff ( Chelcie Ross ) or a supposed FBI agent ( Gary Cole )—will get in Hank’s way. For an actor tied to delivering memorable lines like “Game over, man!” in “ Aliens ,” and playing support to spectacles in “ Twister ” and bigger casts in “ Apollo 13 ,” “A Simple Plan” is Paxton showing his range. He plays up his blue collar attitude while trying to hide darker motives.
In Jacob, Thornton embodies a depressed, virginal drunk. The lonely, older brother to Hank, Jacob has nothing, save his dog, spare mattress and messy apartment. Jacob casually admits these details as a way to confess that keeping the money is as worthless as his life. On paper, Jacob reads as the typical Thornton character: the good-hearted loser with a drinking problem. In contrast to Thornton’s profane and loud turns in “ Bad Santa ” or “Goliath,” Jacob is soft-spoken and aloof, helplessly stuttering, puttering and wincing. For those who think Thornton always plays the badass, Jacob is the direct opposite, revealing the actor’s too-rarely-tapped range. “I mean hell, Hank, I’ve never even kissed a girl,” Jacob says. “You know, if me becoming rich is gonna change all that, you know I’m all for it.” It’s heartbreaking because of the honesty in Thornton’s performance contrasted against how clearly Raimi and Smith foreshadow the tragedy to come.
As Sarah, Fonda is also given more dimension than the typical girl-next-door parts for which she was known. Sarah is introduced as a heavenly sight, an angel standing pregnant and naked in the room of her soon-to-be-born daughter. When Sarah is told about the money, she desires only to protect the small, nice life her family has. But like Hank, greed quickly infects her mind. While working at the library, her job comes second to investigating how the plane crashed. Soon, she’s making suggestions to Hank’s stories, enabling him with lines like, “Nobody’d ever believe you’d be capable of doing what you’ve done.”
In a last ditch effort, she pleads her case. Through tears, she wonders what life would be like without the money. “What about me? Spending the rest of my life, eight hours a day, with a fake smile plastered on my face checking out books,” Sarah says to Hank. “And then coming home to cook dinner for you, the same meals over and over again, whatever the week's coupons will allow.”
Briscoe, a character actor known for turns in “Twin Peaks” and “ Sling Blade ,” is the loudest of all the leads as Lou. But his volume is necessary to the story, further complicating Jacob and Hank’s family dynamics. As Jacob’s best friend, Lou is the brother Hank isn’t. “You know we don’t have one thing in common me and (Hank), except maybe our last name,” Jacob tells Lou. “You’re more like a brother to me than he is.” Unlike Hank, Lou keeps Jacob’s attention with silly jokes and stories. Jacob and Lou regularly hang out at bars, taking beers with shots of whiskey. Eventually, Lou bumps into another patron and starts a fight. Such a temperament is a risk to Hank’s plan of quietly keeping the money. Lou could ruin everything, and Hank tries to convince Jacob of Lou’s reckless nature.
As the typically typecast performers subvert expectations, Raimi also stays out of the way of the already gripping story. “A Simple Plan” isn’t Raimi having fun at a genre’s expense. Instead, he’s honestly respecting the reality of these characters’ world. Any trace of the CGI wizardry we’ve come to expect with Raimi’s movies barely exists here (a few puppeteers were hired to control some crows, but that’s about it). Raimi even sought advice from the Coen brothers on how to shoot naturally and most effectively in the snow; a trick the brothers learned while shooting “ Fargo .”
Raimi foregoes the dark comedy and bloodshed of that Coen film for pulse-quickening tension borne from understandable, human decisions. Hank gets word that an FBI agent without a badge wants to investigate the crash site. Soon, Hank is balancing his family, greed and crimes—all while being cornered in the sheriff’s office. Yet, even in these jams, Hank still positions himself to get away clean. Each move, every bit of deception, piles up, forcing Hank and Jacob to face their lies. By the end of the film, the best Hank can hope for is a future filled with days when he manages “not to think of anything at all,” he says, “... as if none of it ever happened. Those days are few and far between.”
The days where Raimi would explore such themes with more restraint may be far behind us, too. By 2002, the director found the perfect showcase and budget for his style in “ Spider-Man .” He perfected the mix of his signature ingredients (special effects, tension-filled action, casts full of scene-stealing character actors like J.K. Simmons) in “Spider-Man 2.” Raimi does deserve credit for delivering a dramatic, stakes-filled superhero movie before DC and Marvel thought to build its’ cinematic universes. But before Raimi got his Spidey sense, he found space for his style to roam rather than dominate in “A Simple Plan.” Stripped of extravagance and $200 million budgets, Raimi proved he could make a smaller, more dramatic movie that’s as good, if not better, than his cult classics and blockbusters. Hopefully, it doesn’t take him another 20 years to return to that quieter, simpler place.
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A Simple Plan by Scott Smith
A Simple Plan Book Review The novel I read is called A Simple Plan, written by Scott Smith. He spent 5 years writing this book. Also he received an academy award for his screen play of the movie A Simple Plan. This book is very detailed and full of suspense with the changing of events as the story is told. Its not a hard book to understand and has a great plot. In the novel, Hank Mitchell, his older brother Jacob and Jacob's friend Lou are riding together in Jacob's truck when a fox runs across the road in front of them. The truck ends up in a snow bank and Jacob's dog runs after the fox. The three men go after the dog and after hiking about a half hour, find an airplane that has crashed in the woods. Hank goes inside to check on the pilot, when he finds the pilot dead and a duffle bag filled with money. After some discussion, they agree that Hank will hold the money for six months and at the end of that time, if no one comes searching for it, they'll divide the money and each go their separate ways, richer than they'd ever imagined. Soon after what seemed as a simple plan, turned into a run in with the law and went down hill from there. The way I felt about the book after I read it, makes me think of what I’d do in the same situation if I found the crashed plane, and I found the bag full of money. I would have done the same probably and not said nothing about the plane or dead pilot and just kept the money and been set for life. I would recommend this book to read it was a great story and full of suspense. I would read another book by this author just because of how good this book was.
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A Simple Plan
 Member LoginForgot your login/password? BKMT READING GUIDES A Simple Plan by Scott Smith IntroductionTwo brothers and their friend stumble upon the wreckage of a plane–the pilot is dead and his duffle bag contains four million dollars in cash. In order to hide, keep, and share the fortune, these ordinary men all agree to a simple plan. Editorial ReviewDiscussion questions, notes from the author to the bookclub, book club recommendations. Recommended to book clubs by 0 of 0 members. Member ReviewsNow serving over 80,000 book clubs & ready to welcome yours. Join us and get the Top Book Club Picks of 2022 (so far).  Get Top Club Picks Delivered Weekly
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A Simple PlanIf you’re going to stumble onto $4 million, there are few places to do it that are spookier, or more cinematic, than the site of a crashed propeller plane buried in the snowy serenity of a Midwestern wilderness. In A Simple Plan , Sam Raimi’s rivetingly accomplished crime thriller, Hank Mitchell (Bill Paxton), a small-town feed-store accountant, makes his accidental big score in exactly this sort of pastoral wasteland. Hank, a faithful, married, do-right kind of guy, is wandering through the woods with his dim-bulb older brother, Jacob (Billy Bob Thornton), and Jacob’s beer-guzzling buddy, Lou (Brent Briscoe), when a dislodged snowbank reveals the downed plane. The moment they discover the cash, which has been stuffed into a duffel bag, they have a good idea of what it is; it must be drug money, or some sort of comparable dirty fortune. Hank, the ”moral” one, says that it would be wrong to swipe the booty. What he really means is that he’s scared they won’t get away with it. Moments later, Hank himself has come up with a plan: He’ll hide the money until spring, at which point, if there’s been no inquiry, the three of them will divvy up the spoils. All they have to do is keep quiet. Adapted from the 1993 novel by Scott B. Smith, who also wrote the script, A Simple Plan is lean, elegant, and emotionally complex — a marvel of backwoods classicism. It’s proof that Raimi, after the splatterific Evil Dead series and the lushly operatic Darkman , has now grown into a filmmaker of ravishing maturity and skill. In this tensely layered and ominous caper, greed is the ultimate truth serum. It brings the ugliest sides of relationships burbling to the surface: hostility in place of trust, hunger crushing all restraint. Given the prospect of all that money, even the happiest of marriages is not what it seems. From the outset, there’s a self-destructive rivalry between Hank, the hard-toiling family man, and the lowly, unemployed wastrel Lou, who hails from the opposite side of the class spectrum. Lou thinks Hank is a wimp, a college-boy priss, and he takes a special delight in taunting him (especially when drunk). The most intriguing character is the one who stands between the two, the wormy, ambiguous Jacob, who is tied to Hank by blood but closer to his buddy by temperament. Here, as in Sling Blade , Thornton creates a poignant man-child, only this time he brings the character’s lonely freakishness perilously close to us. Stunted yet innocent, with a grotesque doofus scowl and tufts of greasy long hair poking out from his cap, his Jacob is a born loser who sees more than he appears to. His strength lies not in his brain but in his repressed resentment — it gives him feelers. Thornton is one of those actors who seem to alter the very shape of the their face with each role. He gives a memorable performance, as if Jim Varney were channeling Charles Laughton. Only rarely does a movie succeed in making the audience feel part of the criminal process, sucking us into the fear and temptation of shooting beyond the law. One thinks of Hitchcock, or the sinful prospectors of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre , or the perfectly planned — and inevitably botched — heists of The Asphalt Jungle and The Killing . It’s no small praise to say that A Simple Plan earns its place alongside these fables of intimate suspense. The desolate, wintry setting and random bursts of mayhem lend the movie a superficial resemblance to Fargo , but Raimi works without the Coen brothers’ jokey plastic detachment. The comedy here, which is much less stylized, springs from the most understated of screwups, as when Jacob, seized by panic, blurts something to a cop about having heard a plane. It’s the bane of amateur crooks: Every attempt at a cover-up is really an unconscious confession. The ironic kick of the movie is that Paxton’s Hank, the one guy coolheaded enough to bring this crime off, is bound to these two impulsive, neurotic bums. They’re like the billboards of his guilt. Spurred on by his wife (Bridget Fonda), who looks at that money as if it’s her ticket to heaven, Hank can’t back out. He’s tied to his dream of easy deliverance, and it leads him to launch the most patched-together of scams, as he tries to outfox and entrap his partners. Of course, all he’s done is entrap himself. A Simple Plan is the most gripping dramatization in years of the proposition that crime will always cost more than it pays. A Related ArticlesYou are using an outdated browser. Please upgrade your browser to improve your experience and security.  ISBN: 0307279952 ISBN13: 9780307279958 A Simple Plan Select FormatSelect condition, recommended. Format: Paperback Condition: Good Book OverviewIt All Seemed So Simple... Two brothers and their friend stumble upon the wreckage of a plane-the pilot is dead and his duffle bag contains four million dollars in cash. The men agree to hide, keep... This description may be from another edition of this product. Related Subjects Customer ReviewsLoved the movie. the book is... ugh, thin line between good and evil., greed is evil, a gripping depiction of our darker side, money is indeed the root of all evil..., absolutely mesmerizing, popular categories.
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 Follow the author A Simple Plan Hardcover – August 1, 2014
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About the authorScott smith. Discover more of the author’s books, see similar authors, read author blogs and more Customer reviews
Customer Reviews, including Product Star Ratings help customers to learn more about the product and decide whether it is the right product for them. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Instead, our system considers things like how recent a review is and if the reviewer bought the item on Amazon. It also analyzed reviews to verify trustworthiness. Customers sayCustomers find the storyline intricate, riveting, and twisty with believable characters. They also describe the pacing as fast. Readers praise the writing quality as excellent and simple. However, some find the realism not as good as the book. Opinions are mixed on the characters, with some finding them compelling and realistic, while others find them unrealistic. Reader opinions are mixed also on the darkness, with others finding it very dark and depressing. Additionally, readers disagree on relatability, with those finding the narrator believable and relatable, while other find him unrelatable. AI-generated from the text of customer reviews Customers find the storyline spellbinding, challenging, and gripping. They also say the themes are riveting and unpredictable. Customers also say that the book sucks them in from the beginning with twists and turns. "...writer and this tale, a story as simple as Hank Mitchell's plan, is riveting ...." Read more "...If you are looking for rich characters, a thought provoking narrative and a compelling ending, chances are you may be wasting your time with this..." Read more "...Scene Construction: Each scene had a purpose , either moving the plot along or developing the characters of Hank, Jacob or Sarah...." Read more "...A Simple Plan is a perfect suspense novel ...." Read more Customers find the writing quality excellent, easy to read, and natural. They also mention the premise is simple but the plot is intricate. "...introduce his characters and pace the book just right, and the writing is excellent ...." Read more " Exquisitely written , unrelentingly dark, Smith takes you on a wild ride through the psyche of a man who is drawn into evil one seemingly inevitable..." Read more "A fast read but the characters are all awful people. Still though, well-written and the dialog works, worth the price of admission." Read more "...Characterization: The first-person narrative was perfect for getting into Hank's head and learning his inner motivations and rationalizations...." Read more Customers find the pacing of the book fast and well written. "...that there isn't a single loose end left untied and the story flows at such a good pace that reading it is like watching it all play out in front of..." Read more "...Once I started it, I could not put it down. The pace is fast and suspenseful ...." Read more " A fast read but the characters are all awful people. Still though, well-written and the dialog works, worth the price of admission." Read more "...This book starts off fast and never lets off the gas. I really enjoyed it. I am now reading his other book The Ruins, and that one is really good too!" Read more Customers have mixed opinions about the characters in the book. Some find them compelling and great, while others find them unrealistic. "...It's got great pacing, in-depth characters and a good theme. This book was so good it's worth analyzing it in detail:..." Read more "...is a sophisticated and polished read, well-plotted and with fully developed characters . Now, I'm anxious to start another book by author Scott Smith...." Read more "...The characters' behavior is shockingly unbelievable at times because these "nice, ordinary guys" had never been in trouble...." Read more "...And also you do come to understand the main character ...." Read more Customers are mixed about the darkness of the book. Some find it very dark in mood, taut, and suspenseful, while others say it's extremely depressing and a dull exercise in unabashed denial of morality. "...The book is very dark in mood as is Scott Smith's other frightening book, The Ruins...." Read more "...(see below) which fortunately the screen play fixed and it is exceedingly dark and violent, unnecessarily so...." Read more "Exquisitely written, unrelentingly dark , Smith takes you on a wild ride through the psyche of a man who is drawn into evil one seemingly inevitable..." Read more "...I found the latter half of the book to be slightly unrealistic and very dark ...." Read more Customers are mixed about the relatability of the book. Some find it thoughtful, riveting in its originality, and beautiful. Others however, say the narrator is not believable and the book is not very relatable. "...for Smith’s excellent craftsmanship but also for the brilliant insights into human nature with which he underpins his tale." Read more "...There is no character development, the story is really flawed and non-sensical (see below) which fortunately the screen play fixed and it is..." Read more "...This is a nice concept which everyone can identify with and it's easy for the reader to put himself in the protagonist's situation...." Read more "...this is the author's premier writing effort; it certainly is a sophisticated and polished read, well-plotted and with fully developed characters...." Read more Customers are mixed about the engagingness of the book. Some mention it offers plenty of thrills and is hard to put down. "...It is def a page turner & hard to put down . Very thought provoking & makes me even more happy with I what I already have...." Read more "...It was difficult to put down .Mystery readers would like it, although it is not a mystery, really." Read more "This is one of those books that is hard to put down ...." Read more " Un-put-downable in both senses...." Read more Customers find the realism of the book unreal. "...But I found the latter half of the book to be slightly unrealistic and very dark...." Read more "...I felt that the attempt to build out internal conflict was not performed skillfully . Pacing was also a bit of an issue for me...." Read more "...Be sure to read the book first---the movie is okay but not as good as the book ." Read more "...the whole book and the rest is just frustrating and messy and not convincing at all ...." Read more
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At times, the characters and the emotional core of the events are almost obscured by such quick maneuvering through the weighty plot. Dark and unsettling, this novel's end arrives abruptly even as readers are still moving at a breakneck speed. Share your opinion of this book. A fairy-tale windfall blasts the lives of two brothers, determined ...
31,711 ratings1,854 reviews. Two brothers and their friend stumble upon the wreckage of a plane-the pilot is dead and his duffle bag contains four million dollars in cash. In order to hide, keep, and share the fortune, these ordinary men all agree to a simple plan. Genres Fiction Thriller Mystery Crime Suspense Mystery Thriller Horror.
A Simple Plan is a 1993 thriller novel by Scott Smith. The New York Times review said the book had "emotional accuracy with an exceptionally skilled plot." A film adaptation, directed by Sam Raimi, was released in 1998; according to the Times review, the novel is so dark that the story was adjusted to soften the ending. [1]
The Themes Scott Smith's A Simple Plan includes many powerful themes. At the heart of the novel is the first major theme: Good People Doing Bad Things.
Find helpful customer reviews and review ratings for A Simple Plan at Amazon.com. Read honest and unbiased product reviews from our users.
It All Seemed So Simple... Two brothers and their friend stumble upon the wreckage of a plane—the pilot is dead and his duffle bag contains four million dollars in cash. The men agree to hide, keep and share the fortune. But what started off as a simple plan slowly devolves into a gruesome nightmare none of them can control.
A Simple Plan. Scott Smith. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, Oct 24, 2006 - Fiction - 432 pages. "Spectacular. . . . Ten shades blacker and several corpses grimmer than the novels of John Grisham. . . . Do yourself a favor. Read this book.". — Entertainment Weekly. Two brothers and their friend stumble upon the wreckage of a plane-the ...
A Simple Plan. Scott Smith. Macmillan, Aug 15, 1994 - Fiction - 416 pages. Now a major motion picture from Paramount starring Bill Paxton, Bridget Fonda and Billy Bob Thornton. When two brothers and a friend find four million dollars in the cockpit of a downed plane buried in the snow, their plan seems so simple.
A Simple Plan. Paperback - September 25, 2007. by Scott Smith (Author) 4.2 1,166 ratings. See all formats and editions. It All Seemed So Simple... Two brothers and their friend stumble upon the wreckage of a plane—the pilot is dead and his duffle bag contains four million dollars in cash. The men agree to hide, keep and share the fortune.
A Simple Plan: A Novel, Volume 5379759. A Simple Plan marks the astonishing debut of a natural born storyteller. It is a novel about a young man, unaware of his own moral fragility, who finds an immense cache of money - and makes a seemingly plausible decision that sets his hitherto "ordinary and ordered" life on the road to chaos and horror.
Two brothers and their friend stumble upon the wreckage of a plane-the pilot is dead and his duffle bag contains four million dollars in cash. In order to hide, keep, and share the fortune, these ordinary men all agree to a simple plan. Book recommendations, author interviews, editors' picks, and more.
A Simple Plan. Scott Smith. Knopf Publishing Group, $21 (0pp) ISBN 978--679-41985-3. Once one accepts the bizarre premise of Smith's astonishingly adept, ingeniously plotted debut thriller, the ...
Get ready to explore A Simple Plan and its meaning. Our full analysis and study guide provides an even deeper dive with character analysis and quotes explained to help you discover the complexity and beauty of this book.
A limited release that expanded from December 1998 to January 1999, "A Simple Plan" is Raimi's most subtle, unstylish movie to date. Bill Paxton stars as Hank, a small-town husband and soon-to-be father who works at a feed store. Luck changes for Hank as he, his brother Jacob ( Billy Bob Thornton ), and their friend Lou ( Brent Briscoe) find more than $4 million in an airplane that crash ...
A Simple Plan Book Review The novel I read is called A Simple Plan, written by Scott Smith. He spent 5 years writing this book.
"A Simple Plan" is one of the year's best films for a lot of reasons, including its ability to involve the audience almost breathlessly in a story of mounting tragedy. Like the reprehensible " Very Bad Things ," it is about friends stumbling into crime and then stumbling into bigger crimes in an attempt to conceal their guilt.
The "simple plan" sets in motion a spiral of blackmail, betrayal and multiple murder which Smith manipulates with consummate skill, increasing the tension exponentially with plot twists that are inevitable and unpredictable at the same time.
Snow blew across them in places, moving snakelike, in long, thin, dusty lines, piling up along their edges. Houses strayed from one another, separated by whole fields now rather than simple squares of grass. Trees disappeared, the horizon widened, and the view took on a windswept look, a white-gray barrenness.
, BookMovement's reading guide includes discussion questions, plot summary, reviews and ratings and suggested discussion questions from our book clubs, editorial reviews, excerpts and more.
In A Simple Plan, Sam Raimi's rivetingly accomplished crime thriller, Hank Mitchell (Bill Paxton), a small-town feed-store accountant, makes his accidental big score in exactly this sort of ...
Buy a cheap copy of A Simple Plan book by Scott Smith. It All Seemed So Simple... Two brothers and their friend stumble upon the wreckage of a plane-the pilot is dead and his duffle bag contains four million dollars in... Free Shipping on all orders over $15.
A Simple Plan, an outstanding film and an instant classic, should finally bring him the recognition he deserves. We meet Paxton's Hank Mitchell in a voiceover as the film opens, as Hank tells us that it's the simple things — a decent job, a wife he loves — that make a man happy. Indeed, they made him happy once, but the bitterness in ...
A Simple Plan. Hardcover - August 1, 2014. A Simple Plan marked the astonishing debut of a natural born storyteller and is one of the most talked about thrillers of the last two decades. It's a novel about a young man, unaware of his own moral fragility, who finds an immense cache of money — and makes a seemingly plausible decision that ...
A think-tank with ties to Trump has set out a vision for another term in office. The former president denies any links.
Republicans have leveled inaccurate or misleading attacks on Mr. Walz's response to protests in the summer of 2020, his positions on immigration and his role in the redesign of Minnesota's flag.