What Happened to Cass McBride? by Gail Giles

Goodreads Summary:
Kyle Kirby has planned a cruel and unusual revenge on Cass McBride, the most popular girl in school, for the death of his brother David. He digs a hole. Drugs Cass. Kidnaps her. Puts her in a box-underground. He buries her alive. But Kyle makes a fatal error: Cass knows the power of words. She uses fear as her weapon to keep her nemesis talking - and to keep herself breathing during the most harrowing 48 hours of her life.

A vivid, complex, and insightful work of suspense, this fast-paced psychological thriller is "Gail Giles at her best" says Mary E. Pearson, author of A Room on Lorelei Street.

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Imagine being the most popular girl in school.  Imagine that popularity possibly causing you to lose what you value most, your life.  Cass McBride is a character in a traditional novel that you would love to hate, but now...she's the victim.  Cass is buried alive.  This novel is an explanation of why from the view of her captors.  It is also a vivid display of her own experience from her perspective.  Finally, it is also written from the perspective of those detectives working desperately to find her before she is lost forever.  Cass is buried alive due to a note she was writing to a friend.  This note, according to her captor, is the reason his brother committed suicide.  Although Cass feels horrible, she determines that to get out of this situation she needs to find her captors weakness.  Can she do it in time?

Cass is talking her captor through the emotions he is experiencing as well as trying to determine what his weakness is.  She figures out that it isn't her fault his brother committed suicide.  There is another factor to this equation.  When her captor determines what that factor is will he let her go or leave her to die anyway?

Overall, a great well written novel.  An interesting story into the world of being buried alive and mistakes being made.  Cass' captor may have been a little psychologically damaged, but it is this damage and this experience that leads to Cass realizing she needs to change.  She realizes all the mistakes she has made in her life and how she needs to better herself to help others.