***The Starry-Eyed Revue***: the naturals

Title: Killer Instinct
Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Series: The Naturals, book #2
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion
Publication Date: November 4, 2014
Source: ARC received from publisher
Purchase: Amazon | Barnes & Noble

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?

With her trademark wit, brilliant plotting, and twists that no one will see coming, Jennifer Lynn Barnes will keep readers on the edge of their seats (and looking over their shoulders) as they race through the pages of this thrilling novel.

Do any of you watch The Following? That Kevin Bacon show on Fox that follows his character as he tries to determine a serial killer's next move in an attempt to save the next victim? This book reminded me a lot of that show -- especially the utilization of a criminal mastermind already serving time for over a dozen murders -- and that isn't a bad thing. I really thought I wasn't going to like that series because of all of the gratuitous violence, but as it turns out, I rather like trying to get inside the head of a serial killer. And that's exactly what the Naturals are up to in this sequel.

The gang's all back together and they're still trying to cope with the fact that none of them realized that there was a serial killer in their midst this past summer. To take their minds off of that, there's a new serial killer in town and he's mimicking the murders of one Daniel Redding...who just happens to be Dean's serial killer father who's been locked away in prison for the last five years. As you can probably guess, because of that, this book focuses on Dean a lot, though it's still narrated by Cassie, who spends a lot of her time analyzing Dean while also trying not to push him further away.

And while she pretty much fails at that 90% of the time, she's still got Michael not pressuring her -- but totally pressuring her -- to come to a decision, i.e. pick him or Dean, once and for all. Of course, he obviously thinks she's going to pick him with that kind of confidence and determination, but Cassie is all over the place. This love triangle of doom, while not the focus of these books, drove me a little nuts because one minute Cassie doesn't want to feel anything for either boy, the next she's nearly kissing Michael, and the next she's having a heart-to-heart with Dean, trying to gauge his feelings, if any, for her. It seems pretty well resolved by the end of this novel, but I don't necessarily like the path it took to get there.

Like I said, that's not the focal point of this novel, though. The copycat serial killer is and more is at stake now than ever before. Because of who the killer is copying. Because there's a new agent on the case to replace Locke. Because of said agent's relationship to both Briggs and the serial killer. Because no matter how much the FBI wants to keep the Naturals off the active cases, they need these kids' help because of their special abilities.

Things were slow in the beginning of this novel, with the post-Locke adjustments and the Agent Sterling adjustments, but the plot is absorbing in a way that even the first book wasn't. And yet again, Barnes was able to create some really great twists that I did not see coming. I was excited to see that after The Naturals, there would be a follow-up to Cassie's story. I am even more giddy with the ending to Killer Instinct because it seems like there's quite a bit more story to tell and I'm very eager to get to it.

GIF it to me straight:

Oooh, creepy...but definitely something to keep in mind.

About the author:

Jennifer Lynn Barnes (who mostly goes by Jen) was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She has been, in turn, a competitive cheerleader, a volleyball player, a dancer, a debutante, a primate cognition researcher, a teen model, a comic book geek, and a lemur aficionado. She's been writing for as long as she can remember, finished her first full book (which she now refers to as a "practice book" and which none of you will ever see) when she was still in high school, and then wrote Golden the summer after her freshman year in college, when she was nineteen.

Jen graduated high school in 2002, and from Yale University with a degree in cognitive science (the study of the brain and thought) in May of 2006. She was awarded a Fulbright to do post-graduate work at Cambridge, and then returned to the states, where she is hard at work on her PhD.

Find Jen:

Website | Twitter | Goodreads | Tumblr

Labels: disney hyperion, favorites, jennifer lynn barnes, murder mystery, psychological thriller, reviews, the naturals

Title: The Naturals
Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Narrator(s): Amber Faith
Series: The Naturals, book #1
Length: 7 hrs 28 mins
Publisher: Listening Library
Publication Date: November 5, 2013
Source: from publisher for review via Netgalley/audio from library
Purchase: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Audible

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.

Serial killer books are rather hit or miss for me, what with the mystery often falling flat or the gore being over-the-top, but I'd read a couple of Barnes' books before and enjoyed them, so I thought I'd give her attempt at a serial killer mystery a try. And I wasn't disappointed. This might actually be my favorite JLB book yet.

I rarely listen to an audiobook from start to finish in a single day, but I did with The Naturals. It was an average length audiobook, so it wasn't that it was short or anything. I just felt compelled to finish, to find out who the killer was and what their underlying motiviation was. It also helps that this newbie narrator was perfect for the role of Cassie. I've never heard anything narrated by Amber Faith before, and upon searching her history on Audible, I found that this was the only title listed. If this truly was her first audiobook, then she was very well cast. And I hope she'll be back for the sequel!

The serial killer aspect of this novel was intriguing and well-done, keeping me guessing till nearly the very end, but it was the characters that made this story as incredible as it was for me. They were so diverse, each with their own skill set and idiosyncrasies. There's Cassie, of course, who can sense what a person is like, what their intentions are, before they ever utter a word. Michael, the boy who helped lure her into the world of the Naturals, can sense emotions, tells, and scrutinizes your every facial expression to determine what you're thinking. Sloane is a statistician, mathematician, a number guru, and her blunt, to-the-point demeanor reminded me so much of Amy from The Big Bang Theory. Lia, who might have the most handy gift, is a human lie detector. And Dean, like Cassie, is a natural profiler...a brooding one. The game of Truth or Dare these kids play is all the more fun because of each of their special abilities.

The story is fraught with tension, between the Naturals all living in one house, between the Naturals and the figures of authority training them in their abilities, and because the serial killer is stepping up their game. I appreciated that we got a background story on most of the kids and that there wasn't a lot of info-dumping involved where the cases were concerned. The author took her time, weaving an intricate story, but the book reads fast and even a bit chaotic toward the end, leaving me wanting to re-listen for any details I might have missed in my rush to know all the things. And getting inside the killer's head -- like, actual portions that the killer narrated -- just upped the creepy-factor.

Adding to the tension in the house is the fact that both Michael and Dean have an interest in Cassie. And she shows mutual interest in both boys, for different reasons. As much as I liked the group dynamic in the house, I liked what was going on with these three so much more, and not just because of the romantic aspect. I don't love or hate romantic entanglements of a triangular nature; I just like to see a romance done right. And the way Cassie's feelings developed for each boy, and not just in a physical sense, was perfect. First and foremost, her goal is to find her mother's killer, so she tries to remain professional and only learn about each boy in a professional capacity, but in doing so, she grows to care about both boys and vice versa. Though both guys acted as rivals toward each other, the progression of the love triangle was natural and in the end, I found their responses and reactions to each other to be rather mature. I guess being gunned down by a psychopath will do that to you.

You know, the more I think about this novel, the more I find myself liking it. It had everything I'm looking for in a great read: action, suspense, romance, great characters, snarky dialogue. And it left me wanting more. I don't want to wait until November to catch up with the Naturals again!

GIF it to me straight:

I'm doing my happy dance because this book was even more awesome than I expected!

About the author:

Jennifer Lynn Barnes (who mostly goes by Jen) was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma. She has been, in turn, a competitive cheerleader, a volleyball player, a dancer, a debutante, a primate cognition researcher, a teen model, a comic book geek, and a lemur aficionado. She's been writing for as long as she can remember, finished her first full book (which she now refers to as a "practice book" and which none of you will ever see) when she was still in high school, and then wrote Golden the summer after her freshman year in college, when she was nineteen.

Jen graduated high school in 2002, and from Yale University with a degree in cognitive science (the study of the brain and thought) in May of 2006. She was awarded a Fulbright to do post-graduate work at Cambridge, and then returned to the states, where she is hard at work on her PhD.

Find Jen:

Website | Twitter | Goodreads | Tumblr