The Body Finder by Kimberly Derting
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Summary:
Violet Ambrose is grappling with two major issues: Jay Heaton and her morbid secret ability. While the sixteen-year-old is confused by her new feelings for her best friend since childhood, she is more disturbed by her “power” to sense dead bodies—or at least those that have been murdered. Since she was a little girl, she has felt the echoes the dead leave behind in the world . . . and the imprints that attach to their killers.
Violet has never considered her strange talent to be a gift; it mostly just led her to find dead birds her cat had tired of playing with. But now that a serial killer has begun terrorizing her small town, and the echoes of the local girls he’s claimed haunt her daily, she realizes she might be the only person who can stop him.
Despite his fierce protectiveness over her, Jay reluctantly agrees to help Violet on her quest to find the murderer—and Violet is unnerved to find herself hoping that Jay’s intentions are much more than friendly. But even as she’s falling intensely in love, Violet is getting closer and closer to discovering a killer . . . and becoming his prey herself.
My Review:
The Body Finder may be the first book in a series, but it stands pretty strongly on its own.
In Violet’s world there are echoes and imprints. An echo is a sense (sound, taste, smell) of the dead, be it animal or human – but only when they have been murdered and not laid to rest. An imprint is a match of the echo that lingers strongly on the individual or animal committing the murder.
This being a young adult novel, of course it’s going to have the steamy hot guy and a potential love triangle – but I was very glad to see that Kimberly Derting did not go the route of other well known YA Authors and focused instead on just one.
Overall, I really enjoyed the book – there was a good dose of a mystery/thriller, a nice jolt of feeling the frustration between Violet and Jay and the writing wasn’t horrible – it was just good enough to make sure that everything kept moving quickly and, as a result, I read the book from start to finish in an afternoon. And.. it was an enjoyable afternoon.
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