Need a new series to read this holiday season? If you are into criminal minds, this just might be the series for you.

The Naturals by: Jennifer Lynn Barnes

If you love criminal minds you need to read this! This is actually a four book series but the books don’t reach over 400 pages. The first one in this series is called The Naturals. We are introduced to Cassie, a girl who lives with her aunt as her mom had disappeared and her dad was in the army. We notice though Cassie has a special talent of being able to read people, profiling, if you will. She knows why people wear what they wear and what they are going to say before they say it. She is recruited into the program with the FBI called the Naturals. We meet four other naturals who have been in the program for a while, Lia who is a personal lie detector, Micheal who can read emotions, Sloane who is a human computer, and Dean who is a profiler just like Cassie. The program is intended to solve cold cases for the FBI but the kids have decided to poke into a case the FBI has now. Cassie begins to notice the killings are closely related to her mothers crime scene and disappearance. This is when we mean Agent Locke, the FBI’s profiler at the time and in charge of training Cassie and Dean. Agent Locke is convinced none of these killings are related to Cassie in any way, until Cassie receives a package with the active missing girl’s hair. They begin to realize the killer has been dying the girl’s hair to the same color as Cassie(red) and cutting it the same way. Agent Locke’s boss decides to let Cassie, Dean, and Micheal come to the most recent crime scene in hopes of luring the killer out. This had no result so they placed Cassie in secure protection with Dean and sent them to a remote house. Agent Locke wanted this to be a secret from the other Naturals but Micheal decided to follow Cassie and Dean to the house. I will leave it there as I can’t spoil the end but it is something you never expected. 

Killer Instinct by: Jennifer Lynn Barnes

This is the second book to the Naturals series. After a close call for Micheal, Dean, and Cassie at the end of the previous book they are trying to recover, mentally. Another killer strikes, this one hitting home for Dean. We learned in the other book that Dean’s father was a serial killer, Daniel Redding. He has been in prison for years now since Dean was 12. He killed over 20 women. This new killer on the loose is now using Daniel’s same signature, and style of killing. Dean does not take this well and neither does the FBI. They put all the kids basically on house arrest. Cassie, Lia and Micheal do not care, they want to help Dean. They decided to go to the scene of the crime which is a college in their local town. They went to the campus party to try to find leads as this girl attended the college and was found on campus. They noticed all the leads were from the Monsters or Men: The Psychology of Serial killers class. The professor to be exact, he was writing a book about Daniel Redding and based most of his class around him. This became a dead end because the next day they found the professor dead inside his house. With the killer still on the loose the FBI decide to let Dean go see his father in prison, great idea right? This leads nowhere again besides hurting Dean more. They looked into the visitors list of Daniel Redding while in prison and found one name who stuck out and this woman lived in town. Dean, Cassie, and Micheal snuck out the next day to go visit this lady. She claims to be dating Daniel redding and thinks he will be released from prison. She also has a son, who lets just say, is not the most welcoming and seems to be violent. The naturals leave the house after the son stormed out and of course was caught by their boss. Cassie believed she nailed the killer to the son of the lady dating Daniel, he was not happy about it and wanted his mothers approval. This was until they found out the son went to the police station to file a report on the Naturals and he came back to his mother dead(police officer dropped him off). This was another dead end for Cassie. She was also placed under house arrest again and had to have a guard with her at all times. What are the naturals going to do? Will they catch this killer?