The Body Finder by Kimberly Derting

★★☆☆☆
 Slow to Start

The Body Finder is an interesting tale centred around a girl named Violet Ambrose who can sense dead bodies.  Well, that's not entirely true - she can only sense those who have been murdered.  This sense can be in the form of a noise, taste, smell or sight, and is unique to the killed and their killer.  Cool concept, right?  This book follows Violet's struggles, due to this - quite horrific - ability and also due to her feelings toward her lifelong best friend, Jay.

I personally found the first half of this book to be a bit too slow, and I did consider putting it down a few times.  In the end, I would change my mind because something would happen to convince me that this was worth my time.  And it was, but only just.  This is mostly because the story was heavily focused on the romance side, rather than the thrilling tale of catching a serial killer that I was expecting.  At times, it seemed like the murderer was the secondary plot, which annoyed me.  I don't know about you, but I think I'd be more worried about the crazy guy out there killing young girls like me than whether my best friend is in love with me or not.  But, as mentioned before, every time I tried to put the book down, something minor would happen to do with the murders, and I would be hooked again, waiting to see if the story would get more intense.  There were actually times in the book when I couldn't put it down - they were few and far apart, but there all the same.

I liked the fact that it wasn't only human's that Violet's ability sought out, but animals as well.  Is that a really terrible thing to say?  I thought that it made the concept more realistic (ha!), and added to the creepy feel of the woods near Violet's house - I wouldn't be going for jogs out there if I could feel the echoes of murdered forest creatures!

Violet as a main character definitely wasn't the best.  Most of the time I found her to be boring and, well, stupid.  She made dumb decisions when there were better options and was always complaining about Jay.  She did have some redeeming moments though, which I was grateful for.

I wish Violet's friends (excluding Claire, who was annoying as heck) and parents had had more of a part in the story, but I guess that could change later in the series.

So I enjoyed the overall story of The Body Finder and the intense scenes, but I thought there was too much time spent discussing Violet's relationship with Jay when there were more important (and actually interesting) things going on for me to give this book a higher rating.

I'll go into more of my thoughts, including spoilers now, so if you haven't read the book, don't continue reading this! :)






Mini Rant Alert:

I'm getting bored of the high school dance scenes where something dramatic happens - I feel like it's in a lot of books that I read.  I just got so unbelievably frustrated with Violet when she told her friends to leave her in the bathroom alone when she knew there was someone out there trying to kill her.  The same feeling I got when she decided to hunt for the killer at the mall with Jay, but leaves by herself and almost walks into the men's bathroom to find someone she knows is a murderer.  Why would she do something as stupid as that?  Why does she only care about her safety after she's walked right into danger?  Argh!  Silly main characters will be the death of me!

Enough of that though.

I thought this book was pretty predictable, and that the plot twists weren't quite that shocking.  The one time I did actually get shocked was the part after the party Violet goes to when Grady forces himself onto her and Jay rescues her (as he did multiple other times in the book - another thing that bugged me).  This was the night that another girl was abducted, and at the same time that Violet is walking down the road alone (yet again!), the killer's POV is describing a girl walking alone.  I thought for sure that Violet was the girl being abducted, and even considered that the killer may have had an ability to make himself look like other people when it was revealed that it was Jay following Violet in his car, not the killer.  When I decided that wasn't the case, I thought that maybe Jay was the murderer all along - what a twist that would have been!  But then I reasoned it out and dejectedly realised that it was simply another girl that the murderer had taken.

I don't have much else to say except that I am considering picking up the next book in the series, so it can't have made that bad of an impression! :)