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 she’s falling intensely in love, Vio­let is get­ting closer and closer to dis­cov­er­ing a killer… and becom­ing his prey herself.

As soon as I read the syn­op­sis, I couldn’t wait to read The Body Finder and I wasn’t dis­ap­pointed. While I bring up some neg­a­tive points in my review, these were mostly issues that came up whilst look­ing back rather than things that both­ered me as I was reading.

A cou­ple of points I have hid­den as white text, as they con­tain spoilers

The Body Finder has a fas­ci­nat­ing con­cept, that untimely deaths leave behind an echo which is imprinted onto the killer. I’ve read (and loved) many books where the pro­tag­o­nist can see or talk to ghosts, but I’ve not come across a char­ac­ter with this type of con­nec­tion to the dead before. I loved that every echo was unique and took on a dif­fer­ent form, one victim’s echo was an oily sheen, another, the gen­tle tin­kling of bells.

Spaced through­out the book are some unset­tling chap­ters nar­rated from the killer’s point of view. These worked well at height­en­ing the ten­sion at spe­cific moments and a cou­ple of times allowed Dert­ing to play with the reader. Nev­er­the­less, I didn’t feel the killer was as well-developed as he should have been. What were his motives? His name, his back­ground? How does he kill his vic­tims? How do these two men find each other? How many girls has he killed? We sadly only ever skim the very sur­face of this char­ac­ter. What I wanted was a dark, com­plex and fright­en­ingly real­is­tic mur­derer, what I got felt more like a stan­dard paint-by-numbers ser­ial killer. Given that The Body Finder seems to be aimed at older read­ers, I do think Dert­ing played it a lit­tle too safe here.

Vio­let wasn’t quite the prac­ti­cal, tough-cookie I like my hero­ines to be (she has sev­eral fool­ish moments), but she doesn’t get too angsty or depressed about her sit­u­a­tion either.  She does spend way too much time ago­nis­ing over her own feel­ings for Jay, but it’s more of a sort-yourself-out-girl-and-stop-being-so-pathetic self talk rather than a sighing-longingly-over-Jay’s-body kind of thing. I was def­i­nitely root­ing for the two of them. I felt Dert­ing con­veyed how close they were, their ease around one another, nicely. It was obvi­ously they cared a lot for each other. But I have to admit, once the inevitable hap­pened, I found them slightly less com­pelling. Partly because Jay dis­played a pos­ses­sive side I wasn’t entirely com­fort­able with, but mostly because the main story line took a back seat in favor of Vio­let and Jay’s ‘home­work ses­sions’. Even for a romance junkie like me, it got frustrating.

There were sev­eral incon­sis­ten­cies, which nagged at me. The killer admits he ‘gets of’ on the hunt, the thrill of the chase, but then later gets angry when a girl fights back and runs, stat­ing that he likes them pas­sive. In the first abduc­tion the killer talks about tread­ing care­fully, gain­ing the girl’s trust. This makes sense, until we learn that he is a cop. His uni­form auto­mat­i­cally gen­er­ates trust, and girls would have no qualms about get­ting into a police car  (which we see, when the killer picks up a drunk girl of the road). These con­tra­dic­tions seem to be explained once we dis­cover that there are two killers, except that Dert­ing makes it clear that it is always the cop who adducts the girls and dumps the girls, and it is his thoughts we have been read­ing all along.*End spoiler*

The Body Finder def­i­nitely had its ridicu­lous, cliché moments. Jay’s sud­den ‘hot­ness’ was way over the top, as every girl at school starts fol­low­ing him around and fight­ing over him (yet the reader still doesn’t know what he looks like). It’s not a par­tic­u­larly flat­ter­ing por­trayal of young girls. I was also rather bemused by the idea that mur­dered ani­mals felt the need to be buried in a lit­tle ani­mal ceme­tery before they could be ‘at peace’. On a more seri­ous note, there was a par­tic­u­lar scene involv­ing Grady at a party, that I felt was han­dled poorly.

How­ever, I did like that Violet’s abil­ity was some­thing she was born with, a nat­ural part of her that she didn’t have to hide from her fam­ily and her best friend. It meant her par­ents, and her father in par­tic­u­lar, could offer sup­port and have more of an active pres­ence than you see in a lot of YA. Though I would have liked to have seen more of them, it was also great that Vio­let had sev­eral sup­port­ive female friends as well.

The end­ing felt rushed and a lit­tle clumsy and Dert­ing doesn’t quite get the bal­ance right between mur­der mys­tery and high-school romance, but I still very much enjoyed The Body Finder and can’t wait to read the next book. Some areas could have been tight­ened up or taken fur­ther but over­all, I loved the con­cept. An indul­gent and engross­ing read.