Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Me on Killer Instinct

Title: Killer Instinct
Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes
Release Date: November 4, 2014
Publisher: Disney-Hyperion

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?

Killer Instinct is mysterious, thrilling, and full of tension. This is a journey into the psyche of a killer you'd never want to some up against, and a race against time to stop said killer and save all the would-be victims without becoming one of them.

Cassie is back, trying to solve murders, trying to navigate a house full of gifted but slightly broken teens. Trying to fix everything and understand everyone. Which is frustrating, considering she lives in a house of people with secrets and hidden motives. It's a complicated web of truth and lies. And Cassie wants to help, she genuinely does, but more than a few of them don't want her kind of help. The pure and honest kind.

There are a fair number of complicated relationships in this book involving almost every single character. Cassie, Dean, Michael, Lia, Briggs, Sterling. The FBI. As much as it's about solving cases, catching murderers, understanding what motivates people towards good or evil, this book is about the relationships people have. How they connect with each other, what they get out of that connection, and what they do with it.

What motivates criminals to become criminals, into committing arson, assault, rape, or murder? Do you really want to know? Do you really want to learn to think how they do, to think about what they think about? This is what Cassie does, but is it really for the best? What if there's a mind she gets into and can't escape from?

I was a bit lost at the beginning, not remembering everything that had happened previously, but enough was mentioned that I easily fell back into this series. And so little is known about the others, anyways. Cassie is slowly learning more and more about them over time, her fellow Naturals and the FBI agents, so you're never really left out of the loop. This felt just as tense and dangerous as the first book, so fans shouldn't worry.

(I received an e-galley of this title to review from Disney-Hyperion through NetGalley.)

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