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urder predominates in the debuts of two young novelists this month. In 27-year-old SCOTT SMITH'S astonishing A Simple Plan (Knopf)—the film rights of which have been optioned by Mike Nichols—

■ ■ two brothers and an unctuous friend find $4.4 million cash in a crashed plane. The men's efforts to keep their discovery quiet lead to spiraling acts of betrayal and violence in this harrowing exploration of the banality of evil. In 35-year-old JILL NEIMARK'S Bloodsong (Random House), a young Manhattan journalist becomes further intoxicated by the man she is seeing when she finds

out he is a murderer. She must use her reportorial and emotional resources to try to understand the motive behind her lover's brutal act.

Also out this month: Shunned by New York society because their money is too new, five American girls sail to London and marry aristocrats in EDITH WHARTON'S unfinished The Buccaneers (Viking), now completed by MARION

MAINWARING. JAMES SPADA profiles Bette Davis in More than a Woman (Bantam). Smilla's Sense of Snow (Farrar, Straus & Giroux) is Danish author PETER HOEG'S first novel to be translated into English.

BOBBIE ANN MASON'S novel Feather Crowns (HarperCollins) is set at the turn of the century and tells the story of a farmer's wife whose quintuplets become celebrities. Lipstick on the Host (Harcourt Brace) is a collection of witty, off-center short stories by Irish writer AIDAN MATHEWS. In Workers (Aperture), renowned photographer SEBASTIAO SALGADO documents laborers around the world. LINDA A. FAIRSTEIN, chief of New York City's Sex Crimes Prosecution Unit, chronicles her 20 years as a prosecutor—including her work on the Robert Chambers and Central Park-jogger trials—in Sexual Violence (Morrow). The Men and the Girls (Random House), by JOANNA TROLLOPE, a descendant of Anthony Trollope, is a novel about two older men in love with women half their age. And Demi Moore is slated to play the lead in the film version of Rush author KIM WOZENCRAFT'S new novel. Notes from the Country Club (Houghton Mifflin).

HENRY ALFORD