Review: The Body Finder by Kimberly Derting

Title: The Body Finder (The Body Finder #1)
Author: Kimberly Derting
Publisher: HarperCollins
Release date: March 16th 2010

Rating: 4/5

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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 that 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 the 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 Violet is getting closer and closer to discovering a killer... she might become his next prey.

This is the second time I read The Body Finder and I quite enjoyed it, maybe not as much as when I read it in 2011, but it is still a good story of the paranormal-mystery genre with some romance and has its creepy and chilling parts. I do recommended it.

The Body Finder tells the story of Violet, a sixteen-year-old girl that for as long as she can remember she can detect the bodies of animals that did not die of natural causes, since the bodies leave an echo to which she´s pulled when she is near them . In all her life she had only found a human body when she was a child while playing in the forest, but that changed when a sixteen years old Violet, found the body of a young girl and from that moment her is life changed, because she found one of victims of a serial killer who has been terrorizing her town.

Part of her ability is that she can detect echoes in animals or people that were killed and the other part is that she can detect an identical imprint in the killer, so when Violet discovers that the body she found is not the first victim she decides to do something about it with her ability and try to find the killer with the help of her reluctant best friend Jay.

A part that I liked a lot about this book is that there are certain chapters from the killer point of view, these chapters made it a bit creepy, which is good in this kind of books.

The plot is not only to find the murderer, but also about the possible romance between Violet and Jay, whom is her best friend, and to whom she recently been attracted to.

And something that could not be missing (if not, there was no story to tell) is that Violet, more than once put herself in danger. Added to this the story takes place in a small town that is surrounded by forest, in fact the backyard of Violet´s house is a forest, which increases the suspense in some scenes.

I was glad to read it again, since the first time I only read the first two books in the tetralogy and I need to know how Violet's story ends.