Lois Duncan, who lives, works and sets her novels in Albuquerque, New Mexico, is a recent but immediately successful arrival on the British scene. Popular as she is, not only with the soft underbelly of the literary world, the children's book reviewers, but with its most hardened carapace, the teenage library book borrower, her novel of 1973, I Know What You Did Last Summer has now been published in England…. The story takes place on several levels. As a simple thriller, the mystery of who is ...

In the same mail as Julie's acceptance to Smith College comes an anonymous note with the menacing reminder: I KNOW WHAT YOU DID LAST SUMMER. Though the weight on Julie's conscience seems to have left her more apathetic than anguished, the note sends her into a frenzy because what Julie—and her former boyfriend Ray, and his friends Helen and Barry—did was no harmless frolic; in a moment of panic they left the scene of an accident in which they had killed a 10 year-old boy. Even af...

Almost a year had passed since Julie and the others had made a pact of silence, and now this message had come, anonymously, in the mail. Who could have known? Barry had been driving when they hit the boy on the bicycle, had persuaded the others to drive off, and had convinced them that reporting their involvement could do no good. They did report seeing the boy—but help came too late. He had died. With taut suspense [I Know What You Did Last Summer] builds as each of the four miscreants is taunted or...

[In Killing Mr. Griffin], a portrait of group guilt that recalls Duncan's I Know What You Did Last Summer …, five members of demanding Mr. Griffin's senior English class decide to teach him a lesson by kidnapping him from the high school parking lot and leaving him bound and gagged in a lonely spot out of town—where, before the students return to free him, the teacher dies. (Unknown to the kidnappers, he has been under medication for angina.) The prank is engineered by the stereo...