Simple Plan (Smith)

Book Reviews
A Simple Plan, Scott Smith's beautifully controlled and disturbing first novel, delivers a total of nine deaths, harrowing murders all, but it is surely a morality tale, with not a whiff of the whodunit about it. Instead its trail of blood raises a good many rudimentary philosophical questions and does so starkly. What is necessary? What is inevitable? What is justifiable? If Mr. Smith fails to examine them as attentively as he sets them in place, still he tells a thoroughly absorbing story of choices made, both well and badly, and consequences stalled, evaded, suffered and escaped
Rosellen Brown - New York Times Book Review

A better title for A Simple Plan, Scott Smith's much ballyhooed first novel, might be "A Stupid Plan." From the instant he embarks on a path of crime and destruction, Mr. Smith's narrator, Hank Mitchell, exhibits an extraordinary degree of carelessness, thickheadedness and self-delusion, not to mention greed, selfishness and cruelty. The only reason he is not immediately caught or dissuaded from his plan is the equal stupidity of people around him, including his wife, his brother, the local sheriff and the F.B.I.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times

Like watching a train wreck. There is nothing to be done, but it is impossible to turn away.
Chicago Times

Once one accepts the bizarre premise of Smith's astonishingly adept, ingeniously plotted debut thriller, the book fulfills every expectation of a novel of suspense, leading the reader on a wild exploration of the banality of evil. Indeed, it is difficult to believe that a tyro writer could have produced so controlled and assured a narrative. When Hank Mitchell, his obese, feckless brother Jacob and Jacob's smarmy friend Lou accidentally find a wrecked small plane and its dead pilot in the woods near their small Ohio town, they decide not to tell the authorities about the $4.4 million stuffed into a duffel bag. Instead, they agree to hide the money and later divide it among themselves. 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. In choosing to make his protagonist an ordinary middle-class man—Hank is an accountant in a feed and grain store— Smith demonstrates the eerie ease with which the mundane can descend to the unthinkable. Hank commits the first murder to protect his brother and their secret; he eerily rationalizes the ensuing coldblooded deeds while remaining outwardly normal, hardly an obvious psychopath. Smith's imagination never palls; the writing peaks in a gory liquor store scene that's worthy of comparison to Stephen King at his best.
Publishers Weekly

In the opening pages of this riveting first novel, Hank Mitchell is heading down a snowy road with his brother Jacob and a friend, intent on visiting his parents' grave. After chasing Jacob's huge dog through the woods, the three men stumble upon a tiny plane whose pilot is dead. The plane holds another surprise—a bag containing $4 million. Upright Hank resists taking the money but finally thinks up a "simple plan'' that will protect them if anyone suspects them of stealing. Once Hank veers from the straight and narrow, however, nothing is simple. Unnerved by his somewhat slow-witted brother's panic, distrustful of thief-in-arms Lou, Hank commits a murder—and is launched upon a bloody downward spiral that carries the reader quickly to the end of the book. Buttoned-downed Hank ultimately proves to be made of poorer stuff than his scruffier compatriots, and his carefully reasoned descent into crime is shocking. Occasionally, it seems a bit too pat—the reader is left wondering whether anyone could commit so many crimes without moral upset—but ultimately this should prove popular reading.
Library Journal

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. Think of a backwater James M. Cain, or a contemporary midwestern Unforgiven—and don't think about getting any sleep tonight.
Kirkus Reviews