Throwback Thursday: Killing Mr. Griffin by Lois Duncan

Author: Lois Duncan
First published in 1978 by Little Brown

Mr. Griffin is the strictest teacher at Del Norte High, with a penchant for endless projects and humiliating his students. Even straight-A student Susan can't believe how mean he is to the charismatic Mark Kinney. So when her crush asks Susan to help a group of students teach a lesson of their own, she goes along. After all, it's a harmless prank, right?

But things don't go according to plan. When one "accident" leads to another, people begin to die. Susan and her friends must face the awful truth: one of them is a killer. 

I was a fan of Lois Duncan in High school.  Summer of Fear and I Know what you Did Last Summer were among my favorite books back then.  For some reason, I never read Killing MR. Griffin.  The premise of the book is that a group of kids who don't like their English teacher, kidnap him in order to scare him into changing their grades.  He dies of a heart attack and they spend the rest of the book trying to cover it up.

I'm probably in the minority, but I didn't care for this one. I'm not sure if I had read this when I was a teenager if I would have liked it more than I did reading it as an adult.  This was one YA read that didn't sit well with me.  The teens were spoiled, the adults were clueless and in the end, the consequences just didn't fit the crime.  A lot of it was a bit far fetched.