No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy

If No Country for Old Men bags the Oscar for best picture, as it almost certainly will, it's worth remembering it wasn't just the Coens wot won it. Cormac McCarthy's source novel - first published in 2005 - is so taut and spare and dialogue-centric it's practically a screenplay. Vietnam veteran Llewellyn Moss is out hunting antelope one day when he stumbles upon some rather bigger kill: a handful of dead Mexicans, a bootload of heroin and a satchel of $100 bills. Sadly the cash also comes with a catch: philosophical psychopath Anton Chigurh, determined to retrieve his loot and pepper Llewellyn ? and his lovely wife - with lead for their troubles.

Synopsis from Foyles.co.uk

Llewlyn Moss, hunting antelope near the Rio Grande, stumbles upon a transaction gone horribly wrong. Finding bullet-ridden bodies, several kilos of heroin, and a caseload of cash, he faces a choice leave the scene as he found it, or cut the money and run. Choosing the latter, he knows, will change everything. And so begins a terrifying chain of events, in which each participant seems determined to answer the question that one asks another: how does a man decide in what order to abandon his life?"