It's what brothers Hank and Jacob Mitchell, along with Jacob's friend Lou, find on their way to pay the annual New Year's Eve visit to their parent's graves - in a crashed plane in the woods, an eyeless corpse and a bag stuffed with the cash. Assuming no one knows the plane's missing, let alone the money, they elect to clam up and sit tight for six months to be on the safe side before divvying up.

Telling wives and girlfriends is surely a minor transgression, but once over the line it's too easy to stay there. Soon honour amongst thieves means less and less - the brothers end up killing a neighbour who almost stumbles on the crash site; Lou starts making demands for loans, backed-up by his knowing a little too much about the murder, and the stage is set for a falling-out, big style.

The best thing about Smith's novel is its sheer simplicity. Everything that happens grows out of that initial discovery, gifting the book a crazy, twisted internal logic. A Simple Plan is a suspense novel, and on that level it works like a dream, hooking the reader inside the first few pages and playing them on a line. This is crime and punishment stuff, and with this particular crime comes a very heavy punishment.

Remarkably proficient for a debut, Smith only comes unstuck on twice. The initial murder, while vital to the progression of events thereafter, is too easily enacted - Jacob beats the man, but it's brother Hank who has no apparent difficulty in finishing the job, choking him to death. An underachieving thirtysomething with a pregnant wife, Hank's metamorphosis from Nice Guy narrator to cold-bloodied killer is too easily effected to convince, even as Smith desperately shovels the frustrations of small town life.

But assuming a capacity to forgive, once homicide is on the agenda then there are no rules left to govern the book; the threat is omnipresent. What the author does is reserve the majority of the mayhem for two extended sequences of the most appalling Grand Guignol. Here his tongue cannot surely be too far from his cheek as scenes trip from threat and apprehension into what's essentially an elaborate gore-soaked farce, a kind of exaggerated blackly comic lunacy that Hitchcock might have recognised.

Thankfully, given this brutal spiral of violence and mistrust, Smith still manages to claw his way out to a low-key but eminently satisfying climax. And while A Simple Plan is hardly great art, like the best of Jonathan Kellerman it's possessed of an enviable page-turning ferocity that not only proves that doesn't crime pay, but it can get very very messy.