Book Review | The Naturals Series By Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Published: 2013 - 2016
Rating: ★★★★★
Genre: Mystery // Young Adult // Thriller // Crime
SYNOPSIS
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. Sarcastic, privileged Michael has a knack for reading emotions, which he uses to get inside Cassie’s head—and under her skin. Brooding Dean shares Cassie’s gift for profiling, but keeps her at arm’s length.
Soon, it becomes clear that no one in the Naturals program is what they seem. And when a new killer strikes, danger looms closer than Cassie could ever have imagined. 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.
Criminal Minds meets Young Adult mystery book series.
Meet our characters ‘the naturals’ the teenagers who don't need to be trained in how to think like criminals they do it naturally. Or as natural as forced conditioning from needing to as a child is natural.
Dean is a profiler with a terrifying past that gives him a unique ability to get into a suspect's mind.
Cassie is a profiler and the newest edition to the group. With her mother's murder looming over her head, she has the ability to see the individual completely without trying to.
Micheal the emotional reader, learned the ability to read people in order to know what he needed to expect next.
Lia the human lie detector a girl who grew up surrounded by lies and had to learn the truth also very skilled at lying herself.
Sloane the genius and the precious one of the group. Grew up surrounding herself with facts and then wore those facts as armor.
I loved the switch between Cassie’s point of view and the killer aka ‘you’. The switch gave access to what the killer was thinking, it was interesting to see what the other side was thinking from the profiling perspective. The character interactions made me laugh out loud because they were surrounded by people who were able to see through their lies or half-truths easily.
"a person didn't have to be an emotional reader to see the satisfaction on Micheal's face"
My personal favorite was the games that they played in their free time, I enjoyed the aspect of them still being teenagers. It was easy to think of them as older during other aspects of the series because of how they handled extremely difficult moments, but the games brought back their youth. Each book focuses on a different case that focuses on a specific character and their past, giving the reader the chance to get to know each character's past.