The Naturals by Jennifer Lynn Barnes
My rating: 1 of 5 stars
I thought I had checked out a crime/detective novel only to find it was a fantasy novel – a teenage girl’s fantasy. A gorgeous teenage boy comes waltzing into a diner in Podunk, America to recruit the teen heroine to be a “natural” sleuth for the FBI in Washington working on serial killer cold cases and she accepts, because of course she did. As a retired FBI agent I found the whole setup beyond ludicrous. The author has done not one iota of research about the FBI’s jurisdiction or practices and clearly did not intend for the story to be even slightly plausible. It’s been over 20 years since I retired, and who knows what god-awful things Kash Patel has done to the FBI, but I’m quite sure it still isn’t sending teen heartthrobs around the country to recruit psychics for help solving a non-existent backlog of cold serial killer cases that the FBI has no jurisdiction over. Obviously I didn’t get very far in the book. And by the way, Ms. Barnes, the word you meant was incredulity, not incredulousness. You need to retake bonehead English.