Seventeen-year-old Cassie Hobbes has a gift: she reads people. From the smallest details of dress, speech, and behaviour she can reconstruct who a person is and what they want — a talent shaped by the unsolved murder of her own mother. That ability draws the attention of a secret FBI program that recruits gifted teenagers as "Naturals": young people with exceptional, innate skills in profiling, lie detection, statistics, and emotion-reading, trained to work cold cases the Bureau can't crack.
Living in a house with four other prodigies — including two very different boys who complicate her life in different ways — Cassie throws herself into the work. But when a killer begins staging murders that echo her mother's case, the exercise stops being academic. The killer knows the Naturals exist, and Cassie is the target.
The first book in Jennifer Lynn Barnes's bestselling series pairs a fast, twisty serial-killer mystery with the emotional pull of found family and first romance. It is a young-adult thriller about the cost of understanding the darkest parts of human nature.