The Body Finder In The Replaced By Kimberly Derting

Kimberly Derting, author of The Taking trilogy, writes suspenseful novels geared toward teenage readers. Her creative career began when she began making coloring books for her neighbors (Epic Reads). Before she took her first journalism class, she wanted to be a truck driver or veterinarian, but through the class, she discovered she wanted to go into writing. Even in her teens, Derting was conducting research, “reading psychological thrillers and true crime books, watching documentaries on serial killers, along with every kind of crime drama out there,” which played a role in her eerie literature (Me, My Shelf and I, 2013). The Replaced, part of The Taking trilogy, is just one of her engaging many books as she has also written The Body Finder

Kyra, Simon, and others, all “perpetual teens,” “break into an undisclosed government facility with state-of-the-art security” and are quickly cornered (Derting 49). Their escape is a close call as the members seek refuge at a radicle Returned camp “would never turn [them] away” (Derting 113). The conflict seems to have been resolved as Kyra, Simon, and others settle in at the Blackwater camp until it is revealed that there is a “traitor in [their] midst” (Derting 322). Kyra, Simon, and Tyler, who had been found after having been abducted, make a desperate run for it as the Blackwater members “do what [they] always planned: fight” the NSA agents that invade the camp (Derting 325). The book ends on a cliffhanger, the conflict just barely being resolved as Tyler and Kyra are handed off to Kyra’s dad, who was supposedly captured or dead, and Simon goes back to the camp, stilling crawling with NSA agents, “to make sure Willow and Jett and Griffin are all okay.” (Derting 348). In The Replaced, the main conflict, the team of Returned trying to escape the NSA is just barely resolved when the book ends with Kyra and Tyler, the most valuable Returned, having been actually replaced completely with alien DNA and only left with their memories, are handed off to Kyra’s