Summary of Book
The Body in the Woods is a fictional young adult book written by April Henry. It takes place in present time Portland County and features four people, three teenagers and one man. The three teenagers are Alexis Frost, Ruby McClure, and Nick Walker. While they all attend the same school and joined SAR, Portland County's Search and Rescue team, at the same time, their life styles vary greatly from one another. Alexis is an "Amazon" living off of food stamps trying to keep her mother's mental illness a secret from the world, Ruby is a red head trying to fit into a world that even doesn't understand her, and Nick is trying to live up to his dead father. While these three characters don't have anything in common, they end up teaming together to catch a murder. For them, it all started with a SAR mission in the woods. They were looking for a man who had run away from home, but were instead greeted by a dead teenage girl. While looking for the man, they had encountered many different people along the way. One of them was a man named Caleb Becker. Caleb Becker seemed like an acceptable person at first. He shared the love of birds with Ruby and he always bid them good day when he was in the woods. However, he did in fact turn out to be the murder and was evidently after Ruby. It wasn't until Ruby was almost suffocated to death and Nick getting stabbed that Becker was finally caught. The book resulted in Alexis, Ruby, and Nick becoming closer friends along with being more open to the world.