Killer Instinct

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, graphic violence, child abuse, emotional abuse, and physical abuse.

Cassie is the protagonist and narrator of The Naturals series. She is a teenager with bright red hair who was raised by her grandmother. When she was younger, she lived with her mother, Lorelei Hobbes, a con artist who suddenly disappeared, presumably murdered, when Cassie was 12. A year before this novel begins, the FBI recruited Cassie to be part of the Naturals program alongside Dean, Michael, Lia, and Sloane. As Cassie explains, she has a talent for profiling people: “Given a handful of details, I could crawl into another person’s skull and imagine what it would be like to be them, to want what they wanted, to do the things that they did” (5). Honed to help Lorelei deceive and cheat others, Cassie’s profiling abilities exemplify The Impact of Trauma on Behavior and Emotion. She now uses her skills to help the FBI solve cold cases, but she also intends to find out who killed her mother.

At the beginning of the novel, Cassie struggles to reconcile her feelings about her aunt Lacey Locke, whom