Michael Kardos, The Three-Day Affair

Wow. I can't remember the last time I read a book that I really didn't want to put down, that I put off doing other things to finish. And when I was done with this one, I hightailed it to Amazon to see what else the author has written.

This book had me thinking of Scott Smith's marvelous A Simple Plan. It's similar in that both books put their protagonists in a situation that progressively worsens, seemingly inexorably, each reasonable-under-the-circumstances decision leading to another that's just a little more awful.

So, three old college friends are getting together for a golf weekend in New Jersey when one of them does something impulsive and criminal and immediately involves his buddies in the mess he's made. And things go downhill from there.

The story of this modern crime in progress is woven together with the characters' back story, their time together at Princeton, their girlfriends and careers. All of it eventually comes together to make us understand their relationship and their shared crime better, because there's more to it than we originally suppose....