Killing Mr. Griffin

Killing Mr. Griffin is a suspense novel by the American writer Lois Duncan, published in 1978 and written for young adult readers.

The book is set in a high school in New Mexico, where a strict English teacher, Mr Griffin, fails almost everybody and is disliked accordingly. A group of students, led by the confident and manipulative Mark, decide to kidnap him for an evening to frighten him into being more generous with marks. They take him to a remote place, and a course of events they did not plan leaves them with an outcome they cannot reverse and a decision about what to do next that splits the group. Duncan wrote the book around the students rather than the teacher, so the reader follows the conspirators as their accounts come apart and the ordinary relationships around them, parents, boyfriends and the local police, close in.

Duncan was a prolific writer of suspense for teenagers, and this novel was reissued in 2010 in a version updated for a later readership.