Title: Dead Silence
Author: Kimberly Derting
Series: The Body Finder series
Rating: ★★★★

The end of The Last Echo was the perfect set-up for Dead Silence. The little bit of a cliffhanger had me so anxious to read what came next that I picked up the book and didn’t put it down until I had finished, only a few hours later. Everything from the previous books had been building until it finally came to a head in Dead Silence.

Violet is being blackmailed into staying with the group run by Sara. She’s having trouble balancing her normal life with her paranormal life. Things between Violet and Jay are getting messy because she doesn’t understand where to turn when she needs help. The secrets she’s held her entire life are starting to weigh her down and she’s not sure where she can turn. Things in her life are getting messy and she can’t figure out how to clean them up.

The relationship between Violet and Jay is one of the most realistic portrayals of a healthy relationship I’ve read in a while. They love each other, but still have so much to work around before they can be a true couple. Violet may trust Jay with her secret, but she finds it hard to trust him with information related to what she does. She wants to protect him, but she does so by keeping him out of the loop, something Jay doesn’t want to put up with. There really isn’t any outside threat to their relationship, but everything comes from within their relationship. They have issues they need to work through before their relationship can mature and it was refreshing to read something that real.

Something I liked more than I thought I would was the incorporation of Violet’s “normal” friends with her paranormal ones. I knew that she could keep them separate for so long before they would collide, but I wasn’t sure how the collision would be handled. Derting was able to mix the two worlds without giving one or the other extra emphasis, making sure they stayed on level ground as Violet tried to figure out how to mix the two in her personal life.

The killer in this novel was something else. I got chills from the killer in The Last Echo, but this was something else entirely. There was something about how sane his little pieces seemed to be, even as I could tell he was losing touch with reality, that made him all the more evil. I also liked that he wasn’t after Violet specifically; he was just evil because he could be. He thought he was being the good guy, though, and that’s what made him especially villainous.

Dead Silence closes the door on a fantastic series while still leaving a window open for more. Things are wrapped up and taken care of, but it’s easy to picture life going on for Violet, Jay, Rafe, and everyone else. You know the story doesn’t end here, yet there was closure. The Body Finder series has been one of the most interesting and well-written paranormal stories I’ve read, striking the perfect balance between all its elements. This is definitely a must read series.

If Dead Silence sounds like your kind of novel, you can purchase it here:
Amazon
Audible
Barnes and Noble
IndieBound