Books like Scott Smith

Burke Devore is an unemployed executive who decides that securing a new job requires eliminating the other qualified applicants. What makes this chilling rather than merely outrageous is Westlake’s command of practical thought: Burke treats murder as another grim task in a prolonged job search, complete with research, scheduling, and self-justification.

Like Scott Smith, Westlake understands that suspense intensifies when the criminal is not a flamboyant monster but a recognizable man protecting the life he thinks he deserves. The tone is drier and more darkly comic than A Simple Plan, yet the moral vise tightens just as mercilessly. Westlake, one of crime fiction’s great craftsmen, produced one of his sharpest novels here: lean, furious, and horribly logical.

Four women working the night shift at a Tokyo boxed-lunch factory become entangled in the aftermath of a killing. Kirino dwells on the labor of concealment—the physical unpleasantness, improvised arrangements, shifting obligations—and makes every practical solution create a new human problem.

That is precisely where Out meets A Simple Plan: secrecy does not unite people so much as expose the resentments, needs, and power imbalances already between them. Kirino broadens the pressure beyond individual greed to include exhausting work, domestic coercion, and economic entrapment, without sacrificing momentum. Winner of the Mystery Writers of Japan Award and an Edgar finalist in translation, it is a fiercely unsentimental crime novel whose accumulating dread is almost tactile.

Tom Ripley begins as a precarious young man living by minor deceptions when a wealthy stranger offers him an unexpected opportunity. Highsmith’s triumph is the intimacy of her perspective: Tom’s calculations, humiliations, envies, and improvisations become so absorbing that the reader repeatedly catches up with the moral horror only after accepting his logic.

Readers who admired how A Simple Plan erases the comforting boundary between decent people and criminals will recognize the effect. Highsmith’s prose is cool where Smith’s is stark, and her suspense comes less from sudden shocks than from inhabiting a mind that can convert panic into ingenuity. Tom became her most enduring creation across five novels, but this first book remains the essential one—a landmark of psychological suspense that feels dangerous because it makes complicity pleasurable.