Surprisingly, although when generalised you would say this story focuses on death, there is a great amount of romance in the book. What’s interesting is that while the book reads as a fictional account, and a lot of emphasis is placed on everything else unrelated, when it comes to the sections solely about the killer Derting doesn’t paint over it – while she doesn’t present the most harrowing story she works well within the parameters she’s set herself. There is a real sense that Derting wants to impart advice to her readers, but she never goes overboard, instead speaking the same as any parent but going further by telling a detailed narrative about why one should listen to those warnings. Yes, it shares a few features: a prom, a gushy romance, and maybe Violet gets into some awkward situations, but in the main is it difficult to so much as guess where the author might have got her ideas from. Like many paranormal books for teenagers at present, the base colour is black, but rest assured, this isn’t Twilight, not in the least. I’d had only fleeting contact with this book before I read it, seeing the cover a few times but feeling completely uninterested. She’s changed, he’s changed, but has he changed in the same way she has? But at the same time she’s struggling with her feelings for her best friend, feelings that have changed since the last school term.

So when the disappearance of young women becomes a regular occurrence in her small hometown, Violet is the first one to know. Violet Ambrose has an uncanny ability – she can sense the “echoes” from the dead bodies of people who’ve been killed. If she can find the dead, can she find the killer too?

The body finder series