EVIL GENIUS
Catherine Jinks
Harcourt Children's Books
Thriller
Hardcover: 0152059881
Paperback: 9780152061852
560 pages

• Read an Excerpt

At the age of seven, when you and I were learning our multiplication tables, Cadel Piggott was studying complicated electrical systems. At the age of 10, Cadel could tie up an entire city's worth of traffic. He progresses through high school the way most people progress one or two grades. Although he has more book smarts than anyone, he's unpopular, and more than one of his teachers suspect he's responsible.

His adoptive parents, Stuart and Lanna, don't seem to know how to handle him and send him to a psychologist, Dr. Thaddeus Roth. Dr. Roth, unlike Cadel's parents, knows exactly how to talk to him and encourages his criminal activities. There's only one rule, says Dr. Roth: Don't get caught. With financial and technological help from his biological father, imprisoned criminal Phineas Darkkon, Cadel expands his repertoire of destruction and mayhem. 

In 11th grade, Cadel launches his most ambitious enterprise to date: Partner Post, an online dating service. By watching his fellow students and throwing in a little (mostly) reliable math, he believes he'll be able to predict human behavior. Dr. Roth warns him against this, saying that even though there are many personality tests available, there is no one formula that will determine human behavior. By posing as a Canadian math professor, Cadel forms an online relationship with a woman named Kay-Lee, a number theorist who truly seems to understand what Cadel is about.

After he graduates from high school, Dr. Roth encourages Stuart and Lanna to send Cadel to the Axis Institute, the school founded by Phineas Darkkon. Cadel's class schedule at Axis includes classes like forgery and embezzlement, listed on the seemingly innocuous course catalog as "Cultural Appreciation" and "Accounting." At Axis, Cadel learns that his father has a plan to eventually divide the world into two kinds of people: the genetically superior, criminally intelligent rulers, and everyone else.

Cadel hardly has time to ponder this plan before his classmates start dying and disappearing. Between the deaths, the dismemberments and his conversations with Kay-Lee, Cadel has to wonder if he's right to continue with all his studies. Then again, with some of the world's greatest forgers and computer hackers watching everything he does, could he stop even if he wanted to? 

It's STORMBREAKER meets UGLIES in this layered story about identity, lies and criminal masterminds. EVIL GENIUS doesn't have the car-chase speed of most of the espionage books you've read and movies you've seen, but the trip through computer networks, bank accounts and classrooms is just as thrilling. In a school full of criminals, honesty can kill you, and Cadel has to think fast in order to save himself and Kay-Lee from the people his father would like to see wiped out. You'll always try to guess what comes next and who the individuals in the story really are.

Visit their houses. Read their email. Go through their garbage.

Just don't get caught.

    --- Reviewed by Carlie Webber

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