The Naturals, #1

The Naturals

Name: The Naturals (The Naturals, #1)
Author: Jennifer Lynn Barnes

by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

Genre

Young Adult, Mystery, Crime, Thriller

Year

2013

Pages

242

Contents

Overview

The Naturals follows Cassie Hobbes, a teenager with an instinctive gift for reading people. Raised by relatives after her mother’s bloody disappearance, Cassie has learned to survive by observing details others miss. When the FBI notices her unusual profiling ability, she is recruited into a secret program for gifted teens whose natural talents can help analyze criminal behavior.

At the Naturals house near Quantico, Cassie joins Michael Townsend, who reads emotions; Lia Zhang, who detects and weaponizes lies; Sloane Tavish, a statistical genius; and Dean Redding, another profiler with a guarded past. Under FBI supervision, the teens train on cold cases, crime-scene recreations, and behavioral evidence, but Cassie’s unresolved grief makes the work deeply personal.

The novel blends psychological suspense, found-family tension, and serial-killer investigation. Its central conflict grows from Cassie’s desire to understand killers without losing herself, especially as a current case begins to echo the trauma surrounding her mother.

Plot Summary ⚠️ Spoilers

Cassie Hobbes is working as a teenage waitress in Colorado when a boy named Michael tests her ability to read people and leaves behind an FBI card for Special Agent Tanner Briggs. Cassie’s talent comes from years of watching her mother, Lorelai Hobbes, pose as a psychic by reading behavior, appearance, and environment. Lorelai vanished years earlier from a blood-soaked theater dressing room, and Cassie has never accepted the uncertainty surrounding her presumed murder.

Cassie calls Briggs and learns that Michael is part of a secret FBI-linked program for teenagers with extraordinary natural abilities. Briggs identifies Cassie as a Natural profiler and offers her a place in Washington, DC, explaining that the program trains gifted teens while using their skills on cold cases involving serial crimes. Cassie’s father signs the paperwork, and despite Nonna and the Battaglia family’s resistance, Cassie leaves home because the program offers a way to confront the kind of violence that took her mother.

At the Quantico-area Naturals house, Cassie meets the rest of the group. Michael reads emotions but hides behind charm and deflection. Lia Zhang detects lies and reinvents herself through deception. Sloane Tavish sees numbers, probabilities, and patterns everywhere. Dean Redding, the other profiler, is tense, guarded, and unsettlingly fluent in the minds of killers. The house itself is a training ground, filled with crime-scene simulations and even recreations of real murders. Agent Lacey Locke, Briggs’s partner and a trained FBI profiler, takes charge of Cassie’s lessons, while Judd Hawkins runs the house.

Cassie’s training begins with ordinary profiling exercises but quickly becomes darker. Locke teaches her victimology, motive, MO, and signature; Dean pushes her to enter the mind of an unknown subject; and Cassie learns that profiling can feel dangerously intimate. At the same time, the teens’ personal tensions deepen. Cassie discovers that Dean is the son of imprisoned serial killer Daniel Redding and that Briggs secretly used Dean’s abilities when Dean was only twelve. Dean fears that his insight into murderers means something is wrong with him. Michael, meanwhile, reveals his own violent loss of control, family neglect, and tangled history with Lia, while his attraction to Cassie complicates her growing connection with Dean.

While Briggs and Locke work an active serial-murder case, the Naturals illegally obtain case files from Locke’s stolen USB drive. Cassie, Michael, and Sloane identify a pattern: multiple women have been tortured, mutilated, and killed with knives; several are red-haired or linked to psychic and occult work. Cassie realizes the pattern resembles Lorelai, a red-haired fake psychic who disappeared after a knife attack. Briggs refuses to let Cassie work an active case, especially one connected to her mother, but Cassie and Dean continue analyzing it in secret. Dean suggests that the victims may be substitutes for an original target.

The killer begins contacting Cassie directly. A black gift box arrives containing a lock of red hair, later confirmed to belong to a new victim. The FBI locks down the house, but another package reaches Sloane and contains blond hair and a photograph of Genevieve Ridgerton, a kidnapped senator’s daughter. The message asks whether Genevieve would look better red, proving that the killer has adapted because Cassie is being kept away. Director Sterling allows Cassie to accompany Briggs, Locke, Dean, and Sloane to Club Muse, where Genevieve disappeared.

At the club, Cassie and the others reconstruct how the killer likely drugged Genevieve and removed her through an emergency exit. Cassie finds a coded bathroom message that leads to Lorelai’s name and to North Oakland, where police discover a body in a theater dressing room. The victim is not Genevieve but the promised plus one. The scene is staged to resemble the room where Cassie found Lorelai’s blood. Sloane and Dean spot inconsistencies proving the victim was killed elsewhere and placed there as a psychological attack on Cassie.

Back at the house, Dean obtains Lorelai’s case file, and the Naturals realize something crucial: the current killer probably did not kill Lorelai. Lorelai’s original crime scene was emotional and chaotic, while the new staging is controlled and meticulous. Sloane notices a discrepancy involving blood on the light switch, proving the current killer had access to crime-scene evidence or someone who saw the aftermath. Cassie also learns that Lia’s Rose Red lipstick, the shade Lorelai wore, was anonymously left on Lia’s bed. The team concludes that the killer may know the Naturals’ abilities, the house, and FBI procedures, suggesting a leak or insider.

Locke tells Cassie that Briggs is meeting with Director Sterling about a possible FBI leak and orders Cassie to escape the house quietly with Dean. Cassie deliberately hurts Michael to keep him from following, then leaves with Dean through hidden routes after he takes a gun from Briggs’s safe. They reach a safe house, but Michael arrives armed, having followed out of fear for Cassie. Dean and Michael briefly face off before Michael lowers his gun. Then Locke shoots Michael, revealing herself as the killer.

Locke incapacitates Dean, leaves Michael bleeding, and forces Cassie under her control. She reveals that she flagged Cassie for recruitment, manipulated Briggs into bringing her into the program, and sees Cassie as belonging to her. Locke brings in Genevieve, tortured and injured, and tries to make Cassie kill her. Cassie refuses, and Locke stabs Genevieve in rage.

Locke then reveals her true identity: Lacey Hobbes, Lorelai’s younger sister and Cassie’s aunt. Lorelai had protected Lacey from their abusive father but left home pregnant, refusing to take Lacey with her. Lacey wanted both reunion and revenge, but by the time she found Lorelai, Lorelai was already dead. Denied the chance to kill her sister, Lacey began murdering substitutes and later joined the FBI under an assumed identity. She planned to kill Cassie and frame Dean, but Cassie stalls her by pretending to confess to Lorelai’s murder. The distraction gives the wounded Michael time to reach his gun and shoot Lacey dead.

Afterward, Michael survives with serious injuries, Genevieve lives but refuses contact, Dean withdraws, and the FBI confirms Lacey’s broader pattern of murders. The Naturals program is restricted from active cases again. Cassie learns that Lacey’s crimes explain part of her family’s past but not who killed Lorelai. She chooses to remain with the Naturals, keeping the Rose Red lipstick as a reminder of survival, loss, and unfinished answers.

Characters

Cassie Hobbes

Cassie is the teenage Natural profiler whose ability to read people brings her into the FBI’s secret program. Her mother’s unresolved disappearance drives her need to understand killers, and the active murder case becomes personal when the UNSUB begins targeting her.
Lorelai Hobbes

Lorelai is Cassie’s missing mother, a red-haired fake psychic who taught Cassie behavioral reading. Her bloody disappearance shapes Cassie’s trauma and becomes the central reference point for the killer’s staged messages.
Special Agent Tanner Briggs

Briggs recruits Cassie into the Naturals program and manages the FBI side of the team. He believes in the teens’ abilities but repeatedly draws boundaries around active cases, especially when Cassie’s safety is at risk.
Lacey Hobbes / Agent Locke

Locke is introduced as Briggs’s partner and Cassie’s profiler mentor, but she is later revealed as Lacey Hobbes, Lorelai’s sister and Cassie’s aunt. She manipulates the program, commits the murders, and tries to groom Cassie into sharing her violence.
Michael Townsend

Michael is a Natural who reads emotions through expressions, posture, and behavior. His charm hides anger, family wounds, and fear for Cassie, and he ultimately follows her to the safe house and saves her by shooting Lacey.
Dean Redding

Dean is the other Natural profiler, a guarded teen whose father is imprisoned serial killer Daniel Redding. His familiarity with killers makes him an important partner for Cassie, but it also fuels his fear that he is inherently damaged.
Lia Zhang

Lia is a Natural liar who can detect deception and uses performance to protect herself and others. She needles Cassie, guards Dean like family, and eventually admits in her abrasive way that she wants Cassie to stay.
Sloane Tavish

Sloane is Cassie’s roommate and a Natural with extraordinary numerical and statistical abilities. Her pattern recognition, decoding skills, and forensic calculations help connect clues in the active case.
Judd Hawkins

Judd is the retired marine who oversees the Naturals house and its daily routines. His gruff care anchors the household, and his knowledge of the property becomes important when the house’s security is questioned.
Nonna

Nonna is Cassie’s grandmother and the protective matriarch of the Battaglia family. She fiercely opposes Cassie leaving for the program but makes clear that Cassie still belongs to the family.
Vincent Battaglia

Vincent is Cassie’s father, who retains legal custody despite being distant from her life. His signed approval allows Briggs to move Cassie into the Naturals program.
Daniel Redding

Daniel Redding is Dean’s father and an imprisoned serial killer interviewed by Briggs. The discovery of his identity explains Dean’s guardedness and the program’s early, secret use of Dean’s profiling ability.
Genevieve Ridgerton

Genevieve is a senator’s daughter abducted by Lacey as part of the escalating case. Her kidnapping forces the FBI to involve Cassie more directly, and her survival marks one of the story’s major consequences.
Director Sterling

Director Sterling is the FBI superior who intervenes once Genevieve Ridgerton is kidnapped. She authorizes Cassie’s limited use as bait because of the political stakes and later keeps the Naturals’ names out of the public account.
Agent Starmans

Agent Starmans is one of the agents assigned to guard Cassie during the lockdown. His presence underscores the FBI’s protective response and the difficulty Cassie has functioning under constant surveillance.
Madame Selene

Madame Selene is a palm reader abducted and killed during the active murder spree. Her death helps establish the killer’s pattern around psychics, red hair, and substitute victims.
The Battaglia family

The Battaglia family are Cassie’s relatives, whose noisy intervention shows that Cassie is loved even when she feels like an outsider. Their resistance to her departure contrasts with Cassie’s need to pursue answers about Lorelai.

Themes

Jennifer Lynn Barnes’s The Naturals uses the machinery of a serial-killer thriller to explore what it means to be shaped by trauma, giftedness, and the dangerous desire to understand darkness without becoming part of it.

Trauma as both wound and motive. Cassie’s entire arc is driven by the bloody absence of her mother, Lorelai: the dressing room memory, the missing body, and the unanswered questions that make ordinary family life feel unreal. Her move from Nonna’s loving home to Quantico is not simply ambition; it is an attempt to turn helplessness into purpose. The same theme echoes in Dean, whose father’s crimes make him fear that insight into killers is inherited corruption, and in Locke/Lacey, whose abusive childhood curdles into obsession and murder.
The peril of empathy and profiling. The Naturals’ talents depend on entering other minds: Cassie learns to say “you” or “I” when imagining an UNSUB, Dean warns that profiling is “a language no one should want to learn,” and Michael reads emotions others try to hide. The book repeatedly asks whether understanding evil brings one closer to it. Cassie’s nausea after identifying a killer’s signature shows that knowledge has a moral and psychological cost.
Identity, performance, and deception. Nearly every major character performs a role. Lia’s gift is lying, but her theatrical masks conceal abandonment. Michael hides fear and rage behind flirtation and wealth. Locke’s warm mentor persona is the deadliest disguise of all. Even Cassie, trained by a mother who pretended to be psychic, must distinguish between intuition, performance, and truth.
Found family and damaged belonging. Cassie leaves a biological family that loves her yet cannot fully reach her, only to enter a house of brilliant, wounded teenagers. The Naturals are abrasive, secretive, and competitive, but they also protect one another: Dean defends Cassie’s theory, Michael follows her to the safe house, Sloane decodes what others miss, and Lia finally admits she wants Cassie to stay.
Control versus vulnerability. The killers seek control through ritual, trophies, staging, and substitution, while the protagonists must survive by accepting vulnerability. Cassie’s decision to remain with the program, keeping the Rose Red lipstick as a reminder, signals not closure but a hard-won refusal to let fear define her future.