Evil Genius by Catherine Jinks

Cadel is a young man with extraordinary abilities. He is not just intelligent, he is a super genius. He is adept at computers and is an expert hacker. He gets caught at an early age and is forced to see a therapist, Thaddeus Roth, who quickly becomes a father figure to young and impressionable Cadel. The problem is that Thaddeus isn’t a very good influence. While at his therapy sessions Cadel learns to exploit his intellectual gifts for his own benefit. He learns to manipulate people and situations. At first Cadel’s actions seem benign and are more like practical jokes. But when he skips grades to start high school early, his antics take on a more malevolent tone. By instigating chaos into the high school’s social circles, he ruins the final exam grades of his graduating class. Only Cadel aces the exams. While no one was physically hurt, lives have been ruined. But Cadel doesn’t seem to understand or care. People are just a system like any other, one Cadel can master just like he mastered his computer.

But life is about to throw Cadel some curve balls, genuine friends. One he meets online, the other he meets at Thaddeus Roth’s undergraduate college, the Axis Institute. The Institute appears to be a normal college like any other, except that it has a secret mission: to train the next generation of criminal masterminds. The Institute teaches you to forge documents, embezzle money, poison people, and to hack any system in the world. And it is a tough school to boot. First year students start dropping dead rather quickly. Soon Cadel realizes that victims are people too. But now that he is at the school, can he escape with his life? And in order to escape, will he have to sacrifice his only friends?

Evil Genius is an engaging read. It does have some problems. First it is incredibly long. Most of the time the story focuses on Cadel’s character development and the supervillain social drama he finds himself in. While I found it an interesting read, I also found the majority of the book rather tedious. It really needed to be trimmed by a few hundred pages.

On the other side the book offers big ideas about good versus evil and raises questions about ethics and morality. It also has some really good action sequences towards the final third of the book. In the end I would recommend the book for anyone who really likes spy fiction, computers, and supervillains. The book is appropriate for anyone 14 and up. There is a high death toll, but most happen out of scene.