Twelve

Once I had finished the Naturals series, I went on to read this novella set six years after the last book. Personally, I think it wasn’t necessary for the story and would have preferred for the series to end after ‘Bad Blood’. This was told from the perspectives of all the Naturals when they were twelve, hence the name of the book.

As it is set six years later, the team have all moved on in their lives. Lia and Cassie have decided to stay in Virginia and continue running the Naturals program. They work to find possible new candidates for the scheme and consult with the FBI on certain cases, however, they aren’t properly agents as they’ve not been through training. I do like that they ended up carrying it on, although it feels inauthentic. The original team was a new idea and they all worked well together, and I slightly think the author was trying to recreate this for money, rather than leaving the rest of the series alone and successful.

Sloane, Michael and Dean all go to FBI training academy so they can become official agents and work on cases requiring their skills. If the book had focused on their journey through the academy, I think I would have enjoyed it more. However, they seemed to abandon their course as soon as they were needed by the program, which annoyed me quite a bit, as it was really unrealistic.

The case being investigated was to do with the first person the Naturals program saved, McKenzie McBride. She claimed that someone had been staging suicides and that she knew this because of the angles they landed in after ‘falling’. In the end, Cassie finds out that McKenzie was right, despite nobody else believing her, and tries to recruit her to the program, and that she was a natural at how movement works.

I didn’t like this book very much. It felt like a final attempt to get money from the series, and although there were flashback scenes from each character, giving more of a backstory to them, it seemed quite forced. The ending of the fourth book was great, and this ruined that. I do think that the writing was okay, but overall, this one just wasn’t for me.

★★★