A Simple Plan by Scott Smith. Thriller. 417 pages, 1993

I’m rereading books from my long ago compiled favorite books list to see if they should make my Top 100. This is a slow moving project, but one that this list maker enjoys. So, I first read this book when it came out in the 1990s and I remember being blown away by how good it was. I saw the movie they made with Billy Bob Thornton and was less than impressed, but I’m going to give that another try while the book is fresh.

Two brothers and one of their best friends happen upon a plane crash with a dead pilot and $4.4 million inside. They agree to a simple plan. One of them will take the money home and keep it for six months and if no one comes forward claiming it then they’ll divide up the money and go their separate ways. Obviously if that had happened there would be no book. What did happen was one bad decision after another that left the narrator, one of the brothers, hurtling toward the point of no return. He had a wife with a baby on the way and while he threatened to burn the money to keep the other two in check, it became obvious to everyone that he would never do that.

“Greed is what’ll get us caught,’ she said.

What’s so great about this book is that the moral questions are timeless. There is a depth to these characters because they are not criminal masterminds, they are just normalish people in small town Ohio. And parts will make you uncomfortable. Quite a few parts probably. As I reread this, I realized that three of the most disturbing parts didn’t even register in my memory, although I have no idea how I could have forgotten them.

The money, by giving us a chance to dream, had also allowed us to begin despising our present lives.

Will their plan work? It’s simple after all. As a reader you need to know what happens to the money and Smith escalates, shocks, and has you questioning what you would do at every turn. I don’t think that many thrillers will make it on my Top 100 list, but this one hits differently

“What we’ve done is horrible,” Sarah said. “But that doesn’t mean we’re evil, and it doesn’t mean we weren’t right to do it. We had to save ourselves.”

My other Top 100 fiction books.