Mini-Review: The Body Finder

Mini-reviews are where I write about books that I want to mention but am too lazy or too busy to write a full-length review for. I say what I thought about the book in 5 sentences then share a quote I liked from the book.

The Body Finder, by Kimberly Derting. The GoodReads 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 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.

So on the one hand, I liked this book because it was a mystery/suspense, and that’s a YA genre that there isn’t nearly enough of, in my opinion. I also liked that the two lovebirds, Violet and Jay, have known each other their whole lives before deciding they’re madly in love--it’s definitely not insta-love, and I really appreciate that. However, I’ll admit that I never got around to liking Violet; she just annoyed me for large chunks of the book--like, “Oh, there’s a killer attacking teenage girls. Yep, it’s definitely a good idea to go off places by myself.” I also think the writing style was kinda over the top; I just felt like the author took three times as long as she needed to say anything. Overall, it was fun to get to read a YA thriller, but neither the characters nor the writing style sucked me in enough for me to really be in love with the book.

The quote

Violet stood up on the watercraft as she came to a stop. Multihued light seemed to be radiating up from beneath the water, centered among the reeds, and then diffusing outward as it reached the surface. Violet had never seen anything like it, and she knew that the spectrum of light was defying its very nature by behaving that way.

It could only be one thing.

There was something dead down there.