The Body Finder by Kimberly Derting

To mix things up a little from my usual vampires, paranormal, romance, etc. I decided to read a psychotic thriller. And after reading this book the only thing I have to ask is other than the main setting of a high school and the characters being high school students, how exactly is this book considered YA?

But before we get into that in depth, The Body Finder is about this junior in high school named Violet Ambrose, since she was a little girl she has this unique ability to sense ‘echoes.’ These echoes surround every dead thing – whether it is animal or human – and depending on the situation also surround the killer. Except for one instance when she was eight, Violet mostly finds bodies of animals and buries them in her backyard so that they can be at peace. However, a string of young girls disappearing causes her to use her power to find the bodies of these girls, especially after she finds one accidentally in the lake on the night of a party.

While she’s dealing with this killer, she also has to deal with the normal high school life and the complicated relationship that is her best friend Jay who has turned ridiculously hot over the summer and who she seems to be feeling an attraction to. But because of a dumb fourth grade kiss that went terribly, they have sworn never to try dating each other again. So what’s a girl to do?

Now that I’m typing about Violet’s relationship with Jay, I can sort of see how this book can be considered YA, but it’s the other stuff – the murders of the girls, the brief interlude chapters in the killer’s POV – that kind of make me wary about giving this a YA generalization. Definitely not for younger readers of the genre.

So this book really had me going, there were a lot of times – because I’m the type of girl who reads more than one book at a time – where I just wanted to not read the other book that I was reading and just continue with this one. It had me on the edge of my seat, between Jay and Violet realizing their feelings for each other, and the killer’s POV chapters making me gasp in horror, I was just…enthralled with this novel. I can’t wait to read more!

Final Rating: 5 out of 5 stars. Refreshing. Great plot and characters, especially the development of said plot and characters. And for once the parents in a YA novel didn’t piss me off! These were amazing parents!

Bookshelf worthy? Okay, now I’m running out of floor space.