#41 in Crime & mystery
Killer Instinct
- 376
- Pages
- about 7 h
- Reading time
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Our view
“Killer Instinct” gives the Naturals, a team of teenage FBI profilers, a second case with far more feeling behind it than the usual procedural. Jennifer Lynn Barnes links a copycat killer to the family history of one of the team, and the confrontations between Dean and his father are the most intense pages here. The mystery stays easy to follow, a romance begins to take shape, and some readers rank this volume above the first.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
A chilling copycat killer has the Naturals in his crosshairs in this exhilarating crime thriller from Jennifer Lynn Barnes, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Inheritance Games. 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? With her trademark wit, brilliant plotting, and twists that no one will see coming, Jennifer Lynn Barnes will keep readers on the edge of their seats (and looking over their shoulders) as they race through the pages of this thrilling novel.
Reading order · The Naturals
Full order & progress →- The NaturalsStart here
7.97.9 / 10 - Killer InstinctThis book
7.97.9 / 10 - All In
8.18.1 / 10 - Bad Blood
8.28.2 / 10
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.2 across 202 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 58% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Crime & mystery average of 7.6. That is how 7.9 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 8.5 | 8 | 4% |
| Hardcover | 8.1 | 194 | 96% |
Frequently asked
What age is Killer Instinct for?
Killer Instinct sits on the Young adult shelf in the sources we use, which by convention means roughly ages 13 and up. This is a guide from the book’s category, not a publisher’s age rating. It has 376 pages — shorter than 65% of the ranked books in Crime & mystery.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Crime & mystery — with scores between 7.6 and 8.3, closest to this book.
