What Happened to Cass McBride?

Book: What Happened to Cass McBride?
Author: Gail Giles
Audience: Teen
In a Nutshell: write a catty note, get buried alive

After his troubled younger brother David commits suicide, Kyle Kirby takes revenge on popular, ambitious A-lister Cass McBride. He blames David's death on Cass's note, meant for her best friend's eyes, lamenting how that loser David Kirby had dared to ask her out. Kyle drugs Cass, kidnaps her, and buries her alive, with only a tube for air (or dirt) and a walkie talkie. Cass has always been good at reading people to get ahead, and now saying the right things to Kyle, asking the right questions, figuring out what he wants from her, why she's not already dead, is the only way she'll survive. Told in alternating chapters between Kyle, Cass, and the police detective Ben, the story unfolds of the Kirbys and their messed-up mother, the McBrides and Cass's driven, loveless father, what really drove David to hang himself from a tree in his front yard, and what finally does happen to Cass McBride.

This here's an intense, page-turning thriller with well-done characters. In spite of the fact that burying someone alive is never a good way to win friends and influence people, no one comes out seeming totally bad or good, not even Kyle. Read with caution if you are at all claustrophobic.