A Simple Plan

When Hank Mitchell, his brother Jacob, and Jacob's friend Lou stumble on a small plane wrecked in the woods near their small Ohio town, they find the pilot dead and a gym bag holding $4.4 million in cash. Rather than report it, the three agree to split the money and wait out the winter to see if anyone comes looking for it. The plan seems simple enough, but each step they take to protect their secret — hiding a body, silencing a witness, managing Lou's growing suspicion and Hank's wife Sarah's cold calculations — pulls them further into deceit and violence. Scott Smith's 1993 thriller is a slow unraveling of ordinary people undone by greed and fear, tracing how one bad decision compounds into an irreversible chain of crimes.