The Naturals (2013) Killer Instinct (2014) All In (2015) Bad Blood (2016) 4.5 novella Twelve (2015)
⚡ Pace: fast · 🎭 Emotions: tense, gripping · 🚪 Entry threshold: low · ⭐ Why read: криминальные загадки, быстрый темп
Cassie Hobbes has a gift she never asked for: she can read people with unnerving precision. A glance at a gesture, a slip in a voice – and she knows what someone wants, fears, hides. It’s a talent born from survival, sharpened by a childhood defined more by strangers than by family. What she doesn’t expect is for the FBI to come knocking, offering her a place in a secret program for teens like her. They call them Naturals – prodigies engineered by life to see the world differently.
Suddenly, Cassie is living in a safe house with other gifted minds: a human lie detector, a master profiler, a cold reader who sees right through façades, and a boy whose charm is a mask for his own bruises. They’re trained to think like criminals in order to catch them. The rules are strict: no fieldwork, no risks, no direct contact with danger.
But danger doesn’t care about rules.
When a serial killer begins to hunt victims who echo Cassie’s past, the program’s boundaries collapse. Cassie must decide how far she’ll go to protect strangers who might be her future… and to face the darkness she’s been trying not to name. Every insight is a blade. Every mistake is a door someone won’t walk back through.
“The Naturals” kicks off a five-book psychological thriller series where profiling isn’t theory – it’s survival. It blends puzzles with fear, intellect with instinct, and asks whether understanding a monster means carrying a piece of it inside you. If you follow Cassie into this game, be ready: the mind is a crime scene, and she’s about to step inside.
📚 Did you know 📖
The series was conceived as a “teen version of Criminal Minds.”
Barnes drew on real sources in criminal psychology and profiling to make the story feel authentic.
Even FBI experts praised the series for giving teens “a sense of what profiling work is really like.”
The success of The Naturals cemented Barnes’s reputation as an author who seamlessly blends thrillers with young adult fiction.
Legend has it: Barnes wrote her very first novel at just 19, while sitting in a café – and a publisher snapped it up almost immediately.