The Ruins

Genre drama Author Scott Smith Publisher Knopf Publishing External Links Official Ruins Website

Scott Smith, also the author of A Simple Plan, delivers his latest offering in The Ruins to great expectation from thriller readers. With A Simple Plan, Smith brought readers into a world of money and morality that transferred on to the big screen with a film adaptation. With The Ruins, Smith takes a diverse spin and decides to blast away at all novel convention and present a book that is unstructured and classically exhilarating at the same time.

With other authors like Stephen King so clearly in his corner, Scott Smith certainly has some living up to do in terms of producing great thrillers and he accomplishes just that with The Ruins. It is absolutely chilling and terrifying, bringing the reader along on a fantastic journey with four Americans on a Mexican vacation and producing some of the most jarring thrills ever written.

With eerie precision, Smith delivers us right into the Mayan ruins that two couples from America enquiringly check out on impulse. With that same creepy meticulousness, Scott Smith delivers something that is so bountifully rich as a novel that it is almost not quite a novel but more a completely chilling adventure that seemingly cannot be bound by chapters of backtracking. Instead, we're left with a simply straight ahead blast of a tale that utterly captivates the reader within seconds and won't let go until it's all over.

The book becomes itself in a way that no other book has. There are no breaks, no moments in which you could comprise a reason to put it down, and no conceivable reason to even think of doing just that. Instead, you're left in the jungles with the characters to wander and struggle through the intensity without a rescue or a break. This is serious writing and Scott Smith proves why he is one of the most intensely gripping authors around today. Do not miss this book.