All In

Jennifer Lynn Barnes’s All In leverages the popular fascination with criminal profiling, a field rooted in behavioral science and heavily dramatized in media. The practice was popularized in the 1970s by the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit (now the Behavioral Analysis Unit), where agents like John E. Douglas and Robert Ressler interviewed incarcerated serial killers to identify patterns in motives, methods, and psychologically revealing “signatures.” This work, detailed in books like Douglas’s Mindhunter, provided the basis for a powerful pop culture archetype: the profiler who can seemingly enter a killer’s mind.

This trope was cemented by the television series Criminal Minds (2005-present), which is directly referenced in praise for the Naturals series, with critics calling Barnes’s work “Criminal Minds for the YA world” (v). The show portrays profilers as a team of hyper-specialized experts with almost preternatural abilities to deduce a killer’s next move. All In adapts this formula for a young adult audience; its protagonists are teenagers with similarly almost magical innate gifts for profiling, detecting deception, and analyzing data. The novel’s premise, where Cassie and her peers are recruited by the FBI to consult on active cases, mirrors the procedural structure of the show. By blending the high-stakes, analytical appeal of the profiler trope with coming-of-age themes of trauma and identity, Barnes grounds the conventions of the adult crime thriller in the emotional landscape of YA fiction, creating a hybrid