The Body in the Woods: A Point Last Seen Mystery (Point Last Seen, #1)

by April Henry

While helping the Portland County Sheriff's Search and Rescue to seek a missing autistic man, teens Alexis, Nick, and Ruby find, instead, a body and join forces to find the girl's murderer, forming an unlikely friendship, as well.

While helping the Portland County's Search and Rescue find a missing autistic man, teens Alexis, Nick, and Ruby instead find a body and join forces to find the girl's murderer. The plot contains violence. Book #1

• ISBN10: 0805098666
• ISBN13: 9780805098662
• Publish Date: 17 June 2014
• Publish Status: Active
• Imprint: Henry Holt & Company
• Format: eBook
• Pages: 272
• Language: English

Reviews

[readingwithwrin]

"For Alexis Frost, Nick Walker, and Ruby McClure, it all started with a phone call and two texts. It ended with fear and courage, love and loathing, screaming and blood. Lots of blood."


We have Ruby the super smart girl who loves mysterious and wants to work for the police.
Nick the guy who wants to impress his mom and brother for a change
And Alexis the girl who is trying to hide her real life from everyone at school until she can graduate and move on with her life.

These three end up becoming really good friends through Portland's Search and Rescue team that they all joined for different reason. None of them really thought they would end up finding a body though or what that would end up meaning for each of their personal lives afterward.

As for the killer well, he had similarities to another one of Henry’s killers. While it did take awhile for me to figure out who he was. What he was doing was disturbing to me, and I hope no one has actually done this or will do this in the future.

While the plot for this one was predictable at times. It also made it more enjoyable when it started to drag a little. We get to see things from multiple different perspectives but the main ones are the three teenagers and the murderer of course. Getting to learn so much about the search and rescue team was really interesting, I didn’t know much about it before and I liked how it also explained how evidence searching was done in this situation.
This book was exactly what I wanted in a short murder mystery from Henry. I can’t wait to read the next one in the series and I hope we get to continue on with these three teenagers for quite a while.
"I do know that its possible to live through things you honestly thought would kill you.You can even come out stronger on the other side."

[lizarodz]

Original Review and Current Giveaway (until June 23rd): Reading with ABC

Body in the Woods is the type of book that I really enjoy. It has mystery, action and conflict galore.

Our main characters are Ruby, Alexis and Nick. They are all 16 and volunteers for Portland County Sheriff’s Search and Rescue. They are training together and that’s how they meet each other. They join Search and Rescue for different reasons, but they are all committed to making a difference. Ruby was my favorite character. She is very logical and lacks the social interactions and clues that most of us take for granted. Many situations don’t make any sense to her (sort of like the main character in the series Bones), but she is brilliant and has an almost photographic memory.

“Ruby had an excruciating awareness of her own strangeness. No matter how hard she tried, she found it impossible to fit in”

Alexis is a beautiful girl with a lot of secrets. Her mom has a mental illness and Alexis is deadly afraid of being separated from her (and with good reason.) I hope that she learns to trust others with her secret and that she gets a good support system, as it’s clear that she can’t do everything by herself. All in all, she is also smart, street savvy and had a big heart. I feel that Nick was the character less explored. He is brave (or tries to be), loyal, and smart. He is prone to imagining himself as the hero that he believes his dad to have been and his mind is not always at the task at hand. He has ADHD, which I understand very well, as one of my sons has it.

“She had never seen a dead body before. It was hard to believe that this was real. It was like she had stepped into a TV show.” – Alexis

Our three protagonists take it upon themselves to find a murderer when they believe the authorities apprehended the wrong person. It was fascinating to see how they arrive to the conclusions they did, but I wouldn’t advice going to such extremes! All in all they make a great team and I hope that their friendship is expanded in future books.

The story is told in the third person from four points of view. From each of our protagonists, Ruby, Alexis and Nick, plus from the murderer’s point of view (and sometimes his victim.) I often love the third point of view because it allows me to understand better all the characters and to ‘be’ in more places with them. The writing is straight forward and easy to read. Even though Body in the Woods is a murder-mystery, it is not hard to read or extremely morbid (you can’t expect murder to be too nice or neat, right?) An underlying theme of the book is not only obsessive murder, but the problem of homelessness. It is portrayed with a lot of detail and it is heartbreaking to read about.

What the volunteers in the Search and Rescue group do is admirable. It involves a lot of field and classroom training, time away from school/work, searching in parks and forests in the middle of the night. But they make a real difference locating lost people and assisting in criminal investigations.

I didn’t even noticed that this was the first in a series, but I’m glad it is because after I turned the last page my first thought was “I want more.” I will definitely read the next book *not-patiently waiting*