Evil Genius

Jinks, Catherine. Evil Genius. 2007. 552p. ISBN 978-0152059880. Available as an eBook on Overdrive.

At 7, Cadel Piggot was caught breaking into a highly secure computer network. As a result, his parents were advised to take him to Dr. Thaddeus Roth, a licensed psychologist and therapist who specializes in troubled youth. A genius scoring off the charts, Cadel is fascinated by systems, and how they interact with each other.

Under the tutelage of Dr. Roth, Cadel pulls off one evil prank after another, from the collapse of the new high school gym to massive traffic and rail jams, and culminating in engineering the failure of every other twelfth grader on the final exit exams. Cadel discovers that his father is none other than Dr. Phineas Darkkon, one of the world’s worst villains. Currently imprisoned in America, Dr. Darkkon is nonetheless capable of transmitting his every instruction to Cadel and Thaddeus, his right-hand man.

At thirteen, Cadel is enrolled in the Axis institute, a school created by his father so that Cadel can learn even more about evil. Working on a World Domination degree, Cadel attends classes on embezzlement, forgery, and computer hacking. Roth and Darkkon’s avowed goal is for Cadel to succeed Darkkon at the end of this evil empire.

But when he falls in love with the mysterious and equally genius Kay-Lee, a girl he met through a fake matchmaking site he created to generate money, Cadel begins to question his upbringing and the morality of evil. Can he protect Kay-Lee from the clutches of the evil masterminds who run his life? Is it too late for Cadel to escape his father’s evil plans? As nothing is at it seems, even Cadel cannot calculate all the variables in the relationship systems that surround him, and people will get hurt. Cadel can only hope that it won’t be Kay-Lee, his friend Gazo, or himself!