Plot: date=March 2008

The Ruins is the second novel by American author Scott Smith, whose first novel was A Simple Plan. The Ruins is a horror story set on Mexico's Yucatan Peninsula. It was released on July 18 2006 (ISBN 1-4000-4387-5).

A film adaptation of the novel was released in the United States and Canada on April 4, 2008.

Plot summary

Plot: date=March 2009 Four American tourists--Eric, his girlfriend Stacy, her best friend Amy, and Amy's boyfriend Jeff--are vacationing in Mexico. They befriend a German tourist named Mathias and a trio of hard-drinking Greeks who go by the Spanish nicknames Pablo, Juan, and Don Quixote. Mathias discovers that his brother Heinrich has followed a woman to an archaeological dig and asks the foursome to come with him to bring Heinrich back, saying it will be only a day trip. Pablo decides to tag along, though he speaks neither English nor German: he leaves a note and a map for the other two Greeks, telling them to come along when they sober up, and brings three bottles of tequila for the trip. The six get a bus to a small town and then hire a cab to take them to the ruins. The cab driver tries to dissuade them but they go anyway.

After thrashing through the jungle for a couple of hours following the map that Heinrich has left, they find a small Mayan village. The villagers ignore them completely, but a boy follows them. Backtracking, they find a path through the jungle which has been carefully camouflaged. Breaking through the palm fronds, they find a trail leading up to a hill. The hill is covered with flowering vines and is ringed by blackened earth with white crystals scattered throughout it. The boy rides back towards the village on his bike. As they approach the hill, armed villagers on horseback arrive (alerted by the boy) and try to keep the tourists from climbing the hill. Amy, trying to take a picture, steps backwards over the blackened earth and onto the vine-covered hill. The villager with the gun (the others have bows and arrows) then forces all six across the blackened gap and onto the hillside.

They start up the hill in search of the archaeological dig and find only a couple of tents. They can see that more and more villagers, all armed, are arriving and setting up camps around the base of the hill. They walk down the hill and discover nestled among the vines a human body: Heinrich, shot to death with three arrows and partially decomposed. The villagers keep their weapons trained on the tourists until they walk back up the hill.

They realize that the vines contain an acidic sap that has burned their hands after they pulled the vines away from Heinrich's body. Exploring the hilltop, they find a mine with a windlass on top of it: vines have grown around the rope leading into the mineshaft. Suddenly they hear the sound of a cell phone ringing from the bottom of the mine shaft. They carefully pull away the vines from the rope and prepare to send someone down to retrieve the phone: Pablo volunteers by knotting the rope around himself. They send him down the well along with a lantern they found in the tent, but when he's halfway down, the vine tendrils that remained on the windlass leak more acid and burn through the rope, sending Pablo plummeting to the bottom, where he begins to scream and doesn't stop.