by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Book #1: The Naturals
Brace yourselves ~ this book is intense. Some moments of the book literally put you into the mind of a serial killer! Naturals are teenagers who show strong ability for particular skills that can be helpful to the FBI. Skills such as being so good at lying, a lie detector test wouldn’t work on them and they can identify when someone is lying. Another whose memory allows everything she’s read or seen to be retained. A very small, private school has been started to train select teens to hone their skills and help solve cases. As you get to know the main character Cassie, and the other fellow students, no one is who you think and they all have secrets.
Seventeen-year-old Cassie is a natural at reading people. Piecing together the tiniest details, she can tell you who you are and what you want. But, it’s not a skill that she’s ever taken seriously. That is, until the FBI come knocking: they’ve begun a classified program that uses exceptional teenagers to crack infamous cold cases, and they need Cassie.
What Cassie doesn’t realize is that there’s more at risk than a few unsolved homicides—especially when she’s sent to live with a group of teens whose gifts are as unusual as her own. Soon, it becomes clear that no one in the Naturals program is what they seem. And when a new killer strikes, danger looms close. Caught in a lethal game of cat and mouse with a killer, the Naturals are going to have to use all of their gifts just to survive.
Book 2: Killer Instinct
The second book picks up about 6 weeks after the first book. The Naturals are continuining to review cold cases, when a copy cat killer of Dean’s father appears. The Naturals have been told they cannot work on an active case and are trying to keep Dean from getting involved, but secretly want to help solve this case faster than ever before more people die. This installement delves further into the backstory behind our main characters while providing some great twists!!
Seventeen-year-old Cassie Hobbes has a gift for profiling people. Her talent has landed her a spot in an elite FBI program for teens with innate crime-solving abilities, and into some harrowing situations. After barely escaping a confrontation with an unbalanced killer obsessed with her mother’s murder, Cassie hopes she and the rest of the team can stick to solving cold cases from a distance.
But when victims of a brutal new serial killer start turning up, the Naturals are pulled into an active case that strikes too close to home: the killer is a perfect copycat of Dean’s incarcerated father-a man he’d do anything to forget. Forced deeper into a murderer’s psyche than ever before, will the Naturals be able to outsmart the enigmatic killer’s brutal mind games before this copycat twists them into his web for good?
Book #3: All In (My favorite so far!)
Three casinos. Three bodies. Three days.
After a string of brutal murders in Las Vegas, Cassie Hobbes and the Naturals are called in to investigate. But even with the team’s unique profiling talents, these murders seem baffling: unlike many serial killers, this one uses different methods every time. All of the victims were killed in public, yet the killer does not show up on any tape. And each victim has a string of numbers tattooed on their wrist. Hidden in the numbers is a code—and the closer the Naturals come to unraveling the mystery, the more perilous the case becomes.
Meanwhile, Cassie is dealing with an equally dangerous and much more painful mystery. For the first time in years, there’s been a break in her mother’s case. As personal issues and tensions between the team mount, Cassie and the Naturals will be faced with impossible odds—and impossible choices.