Final score: 12 Nice, 8 Naughty

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From Goodreads:
For as long as I can remember, I have been told to follow three important rules;
Always guard my ability
Never share my secret
And pretend to be normal.

However, those three little rules don’t make my life easier. I still find dead people and deal with strange visions. Not to mention, an attraction to a boy who doesn’t exist. Whenever we cross path’s he mists away like smoke on a mirror. He drives me crazy, that Kaff Cooper.

As a flock of dead crows fall from the blackened sky, Kaff becomes the only one who can see the truth straight to the dark underbelly of who I actually am.

My hands feel the pull to extract the forsaken, the lost, the forgotten. It comes as naturally as breathing and there is no stopping it. 

Disclaimer: I received an e-copy of this book as part of the YA Bound Book Blitz.

Where Dead Bodies Lie is the first book in a new series by Kat Cazanav. I was immediately drawn to this title by both the name as well as the amazing cover art. I just couldn't resist finding out what was inside this book! After reading it in just a few hours (honestly, I couldn't put it down!) I am so glad that I took a chance on this and read it!

The book begins with a young Stella Monroe in a mine with her father dowsing for treasure. What is dowsing, you ask? It is an ability that allows Stella to find water, and with it, treasures hidden in the ground. Also, dead bodies. While in the mine, Stella gets a bad feeling and suddenly, the mine collapses. She wakes up sometime later with a vague memory of what happened, and without her father. Several years pass and Stella is now 14 and on her way to her first day of high school. Now living with her Aunt Lily, Stella has tried her best to forget the accident that took the life of her father and is trying to live a normal life without dowsing.

Unfortunately for Stella, dowsing is in her blood, and it cannot be stopped no matter how much she tries.

It's safe to say that nothing goes as planned for Stella and after an incident involving a mysterious boy and some weird black smoke that seems to follow her around, she is forced to leave the school and stay with Lily until her Senior year. After three years away from the school where the incident happened, Stella returns to wipe the slate clean. She wants a normal life, and to do that, she must serve five days community service. But nothing is what it seems, and Stella is dying to figure out the secrets that the town holds.

After starting this book, I could not put it down. I was immediately drawn in by Stella's personality, as I felt like I could really relate to the outsider feeling she had. I also really enjoyed the concept of dowsing, which is also referred to as body dowsing throughout the book for obvious reasons. I read all 217 pages in just a few hours and I am already wishing there was a second book!

I was skeptical about Kaff at first, and still am somewhat, and don't feel like I could really allow myself to like him as much as I liked Stella. Out of all of the characters, Stella and Kaff were really the only ones who seemed to have any sort of development throughout the book, but that makes sense as they were the main characters. Hopefully as the series progresses, there will be a lot more room for Stella to grow as not only a person, but as a dowser.

I did find a handful of small mistakes in the book, such as a missing word or a missing punctuation mark, but it didn't take away anything from the book at all. It all flowed very nicely, and the progression from beginning to end was very smooth and easy to read. I love the amount of detail that the author used, from talking about the dark and cloudy sky to the smells that Stella encounters throughout the book. It was just enough detail to keep me interested, and not so much that it made me want to skip a few pages to get back to the story itself.

By the end of the book, I was wishing I still had a long way to go. I didn't want to leave Stella and Kaff just yet, but they were definitely left on a happy ending. I will admit, I did have a completely different ending in mind and was almost hoping that it would go the way I wanted it to. However, I am glad that it ended the way that it did and I am so excited to read the second book when it is released!

If you love paranormal YA novels, then Where Dead Bodies Lie is definitely a must read!

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