With “The Ruins” (Vintage, 528 pp., $7.99), Scott Smith has written a novel so unsettling that college students across the country may rethink spending spring break in Cancun. As he did in his debut, “A Simple Plan,” Smith conducts an exercise in human psychology to its harrowing end. But where the first story was a morality tale, “The Ruins” is an old-school horror show. It pares away characters, through blood-laden pages we read at full throttle.

The novel begins with four Americans in their 20s vacationing in Cancun, drinking away their last days before life after college collects them. On a whim, they and a Greek acquaintance join a German tourist on a trip to some Mayan ruins, where he thinks his brother has joined an archaeological dig. When they get there, one fatal error traps them in the jungle with little understanding of the stakes.

As John Caniglia noted in The Plain Dealer, Smith’s novel “grabs you and refuses to let go” with its “icy dissection of human nature in a hot, horrifying place.” Critics saw echoes of Joseph Conrad, but as Smith moves his characters into the fog between savagery and survival, William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” occupies as much psychological space here as “Heart of Darkness.”

“Fiasco,” by Thomas E. Ricks (Penguin, 512 pp.), $16

Ricks, The Washington Post’s senior Pentagon correspondent, presents a devastating record of the Iraq war. With the participation of more than 100 senior military officers, he lays out the political and strategic errors that led to the war’s current troubles. The Los Angeles Times described the work as “a well-researched, strongly written account of the miscues that led from shock-and-awe to rampant sectarian strife.” “Fiasco” was a Pulitzer Prize finalist.

“Giraffe,” by J.M. Ledgard (Penguin, 304 pp.), $14

Ledgard uses a variety of narrators, including a giraffe, to recount the incidents leading up to the slaughter of 50 giraffes at a Czech zoo in 1975, a true but repressed event. Plain Dealer Book Editor Karen R. Long found the novel “as sinewy and mesmerizing as a fairy tale” and said it also “works as a subtle meditation on the consequences of restraint on man and beast and on a melancholy, landlocked, Communist-era Czechoslovakia.”

“Sharp Objects,” by Gillian Flynn (Three Rives, 272 pp.), $14

Flynn’s incisive debut follows reporter Camille Preaker to her childhood home, Wind Gap, Mo., as she covers the recent kidnapping-murders of two young girls. Preaker’s back story, her history of self-mutilation and her creepy family will stay wedged in readers’ minds long after the novel is finished. Plain Dealer reviewer Andrea Simakis thought Flynn’s “sad, horrifying book” was “written with anguish and lyricism.”

“Consider the Lobster,” by David Foster Wallace (Back Bay, 352 pp.), $14.99

Wallace’s essay collection proves to be a perfect showcase for his exuberant wit, voice and love of footnotes. He moves smoothly from discussing the porn industry’s annual awards ceremony to political arguments in lexicography to the title piece’s concerns regarding the ethics of boiling lobsters. In The Plain Dealer, J. Keirn-Swanson thought the “brilliantly entertaining” Wallace “should be regarded as this generation’s best comic writer.”

“Literacy and Longing in L.A.,” by Jennifer Kaufman and Karen Mack (Delta, 352 pp.), $12

This playful debut follows Dora, twice divorced and 35, as she seeks refuge from her romantic troubles in the books she collects the way her friends “buy designer handbags.” Dora’s dependency requires frequent trips to a local shop, where she falls for a book seller who can quote poets as well as he dances. The New York Times called the mix of book lust and romance “appealingly offbeat.”