I became a voracious reader of genre fiction in high school. One of the finest books I read in my teens was Scott Smith’s masterwork A Simple Plan. (Plan became the basis for a very fine Sam Raimi film.) Scott Smith gained notoriety recently for his horror novel The Ruins, and it’s very interesting to look at the similarities between the two novels, even though they come from two completely different genres. Even though The Ruins is a very fine (and terrifying) book, A Simple Plan is Smith’s opus. It is a pitch perfect thriller, combining everything you would want in a suspense novel. There aren’t many better edge-of-your-seat reads out there.