The Naturals are a group of teens who work for the FBI. They each have some remarkable skill that is helpful in finding criminals.
Cassie: protagonist, a profiler. When she was young, she came upon her mother’s blood spattered closet, but no body. She has always assumed her mother was murdered, but at the end of Book 3, we learn her mother is alive and is somehow part of the cult described in this book. Cassie is in a relationship with Dean, which annoys Michael. Her father is in the military, so she had been living with her very Italian grandmother Nonna when the FBI recruited her for the Naturals program.
Dean: also a profiler. His father was a serial killer, now in prison.
Michael: can read emotions on someone’s face. He was abused by his father, who tries to make up for it by giving Michael loads of money.
Lia: can tell if someone is lying. Biting and sarcastic. We don’t know much about her backstory, except that she lived on the streets. Periodically has a thing with Michael. Thinks of Dean as her brother.
Sloane: gifted with math, numbers and patterns. She’s socially awkward, yet endearing. In book 3, she helps figure out the pattern of a series of murders–they follow the Fibonacci sequence and spiral. The book is set at a casino in Las Vegas which is owned by her biological father and brother. She is extremely thrown off by this, although her brother does reach out to her. Sadly, he is the 4th victim.
Briggs and Sterling: the two FBI agents who run the Naturals program. In book 1, Agent Locke was in charge, but she turned out to be the killer, and also the sister of Cassie’s presumed dead mom.
Judd: former Marine, in charge of keeping the teens safe. His daughter, Scarlett, was a victim of the serial killer called Nightshade.
Book 3 highlights
At the start of the book, Cassie learns that a body has been found, and early tests indicate it is her mother. She doens’t have time to deal with this because the team is sent to Vegas to deal with a series of murders. After Sloane figures out the pattern of these murders, she and the team discover that there have been crimes happening for over 100 years that feature the same pattern. They determine that some kind of long lived cult is involved. The number Nine is somehow important, and it seems there is a child (called Nine) who will be important to the cult. They also figure out that Nightshade’s crimes were part of this series. At the end of the book, they find the child called “Nine”(or Laurel) and Cassie learns that Laurel’s mother is also Cassie’s mother, leading Cassie to believe her mother is somehow alive after all.