Thank you very much! It's very generous of you to read and comment so quickly; I appreciate it.

I had not previously thought of Natalie as the horror genre's "mad scientist" archetype, but the idea clicked right into place when I read Odditycollector's observation. :-) Natalie fills a lot of different roles as FK shifts from genre to genre, and "mad scientist" is definitely one of them! In fact, it gives her much more leeway, where otherwise we're deploring her insupportable methods when we hold her to the somewhat more realistic standards of the police procedural genre.