Cadel is a child genius. After getting in trouble with the police for computer hacking, his adoptive parents take him to counseling with a doctor named Thaddeus Roth. As time passes, he comes to find out from Thaddeus that his birth father is a mad scientist of sorts who has arranged — from prison — for Cadel to meet with this therapist. Cadel advances quickly through his school classes, and Thaddeus plants ideas in his head for evil plots such as messing up the major traffic systems in Cadel’s Australian city. He even sets up a bogus computer-dating site in order to better understand human relationships and becomes friends with one of the women who responds. Posing as a Canadian professor, Cadel makes his first friend with this woman.

As a young teen, Cadel advances to AXIS, a university that his birth father has set up specifically for him, full of all types of criminal masterminds — not just the students, but the professors as well. At the Axis Institute for World Domination, Cadel studies such things as Infiltration, Misinformation, and Embezzlement. Having never had friends until AXIS, Cadel begins to have second thoughts about his evil doings and his birth father when classmates start dying off.

Rated: Moderate. This would be a mild rating if it wasn’t a young adult book. There are about a dozen swear words in the book of the more mild variety. As far as sexual references, there is one instance when Cadel, disguised as a girl, is nearly attacked by one of the male professors at Axis, and he wonders what would have happened had he really been a girl.