Review: The Body Finder Low Price with Bonus Material

The Body Finder Low Price with Bonus Material by Kimberly Derting

My rating: 1 of 5 stars


This book sucked.

I won't go into great detail about how badly this book sucked, because if you're drawn to it, you'll probably have to find out on your own. But suck it did.

Derting's book has an interesting premise; her main character, Violet, can sense the location of murder victims. Her gift is hereditary, and she inherited it from her grandmother. Everyone in her family, and her best friend Jay, know about the gift. As a small child, she found the location of a murdered girl. For some time after the discovery, she was distraught, but once the girl was buried, she recovered.

This set the pattern for her life to this point. Violet can sense any murdered body--including those killed by animals. Once she discovers the body, she buries it, and then she finds peace. Until that time, the body radiates a sound, scent, or taste that overwhelms her other senses. Unfortunately, her family owns a cat that does kill birds, so this feeling happens often. She's managed to get by so far by having a small graveyard in the backyard.

Sounds promising, no? Trust me, the "no" is the right word.

When Violet returns to school for her junior year, she's troubled by her attraction to Jay. He's been her friend for years, but he matured greatly over the summer, and he's now the object of desire for nearly every girl in the school and apparently the tri-city area.

When she's not obsessing over Jay, Violet is disturbed by the reports of missing girls in her community, but the disappearances only become real once she finds a body.

At this point, the novel takes a nose dive.

Here, as readers, we are introduced to a random chapter from the point of view of the killer. He's hunting these girls and gets off on the chase. Oddly, he likes girls that surrender meekly; if they struggle, it ruins his mood. His sections of text are always in Italics--you know, in case we mistake his thoughts for those of Violet. We have to have that extra visual to make certain that we understand that Violet would never consider a girl her age "delectable." (I could be wrong about the word there, but it's the sort of word he would have used. I'm too lazy to flip through my nook and find a real quote.)

Personally, I hate mysteries that include chapters from the point-of-view of the killer. The viewpoint hopping disturbs me simply because I'm not a fan of splitting a book between two characters, for one reason. For another, in this book it seems like a sloppy attempt to imitate adult mysteries or television shows. In a show like Criminal Minds, it makes sense to show the killer's POV. This gives viewers a chance to compare his/her behavior with what the profilers recognize and to build suspense. However, in a novel, it doesn't work so well. In this case, the killer is used to build suspense and cause readers to constantly fear that this time he's got Violet in his sights . . . but he doesn't. The cheap trick of having Violet and the victim act alike gets old, and quickly. Even more annoying, I have to admit that I don't think this trick belongs in a YA novel. I have no problems with YA novels about murder. However, I don't think it's a good idea for a YA to be from the POV of the killer. Asking teens to read those thoughts seems inappropriate.

Add to this the fact that the novel was boringly predictable. When I realized the timing of the end of the novel, I bet my husband $5 how and when the novel would end. He didn't take the bet, which is just as well. I would have won.

I found this book to be a terrible waste of my time. I will not read the second book, and I doubt that I'll read anything else by Kimberly Derting. I understand that this is a young adult novel; I read YA novels more than almost any other genre, so I'm familiar with its tropes. Just because it's YA doesn't mean that it has to be bad, and this one is very, very bad. In fact, it sucked.



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