Killer Instinct
Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Publication Date: November 6th 2014
Publisher: Quercus
~A copy was provided by the publisher in exchange for an honest review~
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
The first paragraph has a major
spoiler from The Naturals, so if you haven't read The Naturals yet, skip the
first paragraph, you've been warned.
After the aftermath and betrayal of finding out that the
serial killer the FBI and The Naturals were after was one of their own, and a
pretty important one involved in The Naturals training, The Naturals programme
is coming under fire. Everyone's still shaken, Deans closed off as usual,
Michaels using his humour mechanism, you never know what Lia's feeling,
Cassie's second guessing herself and her ability and feeling guilty for how and
what she's feeling and Sloane...is Sloane.
What I loved about The Naturals is the insight of
Criminology and all the different aspects of it, including the psychology,
sociology, social science, to psychoanalyze and get into a serial killers head
that gives an UNSUB a profile. How you can tell by certain aspects of the kill
can tell you what type of a killer an UNSUB is. You see how different aspects
are used, an Emotion Reader, a Human Lie Detector, a Crime Scene Analyst and Profilers.
What I love about Killer Instinct, that while The Naturals did go into that, it
was more if an introduction to that and which of the characters had what
talent, and that raw talent that hasn't been trained or harnessed but learned
by the environments they grew up in. The
Naturals focused on Cassie and the serial killer who drew her and the others
onto an active case, an active case that left multiple characters in danger,
this time around, we get to focus on my favourite character, Dean. Killer
Instinct goes a lot darker than The Naturals did as it digs deeper into the
Criminal Mind, shows more of the gritty and focuses on a different kind of
Serial Killer, and in this case, Deans father.
As you found out in The Naturals, Dean's a Profiler,
and has more insight and experience into
a criminals mind than any other Profiler because he grew up with a serial
killer. Dean's the most fascinating character out of the bunch, and we get to
psychoanalyze him more in Killer Instinct because of his father drawing him
into the case of what looks to be a Copy Cat of Daniel Reddings MO. Dean's
still closed off, and with what's happening, and the guilt and blame he's
putting on himself, we get to know him and understand him a lot better. I want
to hug him, and I loved how much the other characters love and support him,
even if he feels like he doesn't deserve it.I've said this before, I'm pretty fascinated with serial killers minds, but there's a fine line between being fascinated with a serial killers mind and being fascinated with the serial killer, which Killer Instinct shows perfectly with Daniel Redding's female admirers, which if you excuse me, I need to go gag. In The Naturals, I figured out who the Serial Killer was, Killer Instinct however, completely surprised me, the plot pulls you all over the place, I was thinking about the twists, who it could be, I was pulled in one direction only to be pulled in the other and then once you realise what is happening. Mind. Blown. Which you have no idea how happy I am about that.
Killer Instinct is, if I dare say it, better than The
Naturals, we get more character development, delve deeper into Criminology, an
intense atmosphere and a romance that is just so damn important, for many
reasons, you'll have to read it to find out.
Rating: 5/5
