Great premise for a mystery series, love the setting and the group of sleuths, Look forward to more in this series.

The Body in the Woods was only published eight years ago, but so much has changed in the zeitgeist of true crime since then. For instance, Serial (the first true crime podcast to become a household name) was originally released four months after this book. So, while there are casual mentions of things like using the internet to gather information, it was somewhat limited in this book. That can, at times, make this feel a little dated, but that's no fault of the author.

The book follows multiple POV's, but our main three are Ruby, Alexis, and Nick. These characters are volunteers for the local Search and Rescue. I do think that in some ways the book suffered from having too many POV's, although this is a matter of preference. I prefer to never have the killer's POV in the book, and this had POV's from the killer and occasionally victims. Without these I think we could have had more time to get to know our characters better.

The book includes representation for anxiety, bipolar disorder, and has a character who is coded as someone with autism spectrum disorder.

I received a free copy from NetGalley. Three teens come together when they all join a search and rescue team and find a dead body that was not what they were searching for at the time. None of them are "traditional" teens and they get to know themselves and each other better as they help hunt for the killer. A little slow, I thought it was worth the effort to keep moving through it.

I am sorry I waited so long to review this book I got several years ago. The Body in the Woods starts off slow, but picks up the pace quickly, and even though it's apparent half-way through who the bad guy is (by the author's design), it's impossible to put the book down because, obviously, I had to find out how it ends.

All in all, a very good YA thriller, also touching on homelessness, different types of mental illness, and growing up in single-parent households.

The story started off flat and I was uninterested. It did not grip me like I had hoped it would, the description was intriguing but it just didn’t capture my attention.

This book was billed as a thriller and didn't live up to that hype. The killer was totally obvious from the very beginning. I thought this was categorized as adult fiction, but read much more like a YA.