Killer Instinct (The Naturals #2) by Jennifer Lynn Barnes

                                              🌟🌟🌟🌟 out of 🌟🌟🌟🌟🌟
Synopsis:
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?

I had some apprehension about reading this book with it being a sequel to The Naturals. I was curious if it would end up being like other similar series which are just a bunch of who done its, one after the other with no overarching story line. It seems as if there might be one but there is no solid evidence of that yet.

My theory is that the books will all be connected because each book will bring one of the naturals team's demons of their past to the focus. The first book focused on Cassie and the fact that there was a killer murdering people similar to her mother and in this one Dean is the focus because someone is attempting to replicate his father's MO and signature when murdering victims. I'm assuming the third book will focus on Sloan because it has poker chips on the front cover and she used to be a card shark.

Anyway, it's not that I don't like these books but I wish, like I said, they would have a plot line that carries over. This book did manage to be different from the first one but I was able to figure it out fairly easily. There were a few twists that I found particularly interesting in the story and the author's writing style still manages to grab my attention and ratchet up the tension as the story moves forward in the book. Jennifer Barnes knows how to write a thriller!

I did appreciate how the author didn't just gloss over the events of the first book. It is easy to tell that the characters were and continue to effected by what happened to them in the first book. I'm sure that I will be able to say the same thing for the next novel in the series. 

This book explains a bit more about Dean's background which I loved. I feel that he is the most interesting character and it is probably because he was raised by a serial killer and is not forthcoming about himself. I enjoyed getting to learn more about him and seeing his reactions to the events in the book.