Genius Wars, The [Paperback]

In this, the third and final book in the saga of Cadel Piggott (now Cadel Greeniaus), the boy genius has at last been able to abandon his life of deception, crime and illegal hacking, imposed on him by his purported father, Prosper English, and has settled down into a much-desired normal life with a kindly police detective, Saul Greeniaus, and his social-worker wife, Fiona. Things are going along just fine, when Cadel's best friend, Sonja, who has cerebral palsy, is attacked, and bad things continue to happen to Cadel and those close to him. Evidently, the malevolent Prosper English is behind all this, and Cadel must track him down.

Like the first two books, this well-written cyber-thriller is packed with suspense, lively characters you can care about, and a complex, intriguing plot that keeps you turning the pages. I was a bit taken aback by the ending, which was not quite what I'd expected. It's not a bad ending, but it left me wanting more. Ms. Jinks, however, tells us that this is the final book about Cadel's adventures. Nonetheless, this is still an exciting, well-crafted trilogy that shouldn't be missed. Be sure to read "Evil Genius" and "Genius Squad" before you start this one!

In The Genius Wars, the third book in Catherine Jinks' Evil Genius series, the teenaged computer hacker Cadel Greeniaus continues his technological battle against Prosper English, the criminal mastermind who was until recently was thought to be Cadel's father. While the brilliant Cadel is shuffled from one safe house to another, Prosper's old associates launch attacks on Cadel's friends and family, and Cadel takes a leading role in hunting down Prosper's lackeys.

What frustrated me about Genius Wars was the utter perfection of Cadel's character. Cadel figures out every problem, is literally never wrong, and can hack into any system with ease. Cadel's always-right ideas, often formed in seconds, are always accepted by the sceptical authority figures that Cadel seemingly struggles to convince; he never suffers failure in any department.

While lavishing attention on Cadel's limitless genius, Jinks systematically ignores every other character in the book. The series' ensemble cast of characters, whom previous installments explored and made three-dimensional, receive little to no development in this installment. Several new characters are introduced, but none of them are remotely fleshed out by the end of the book. Even with all this focus on Cadel, the book still ends unresolved for both him and every other character.

Perhaps the only non-Cadel character to receive development in the book is Gazo, an old friend of Cadel's from the sham criminal college he attended in the first book, Evil Genius. In past books, Gazo has had to wear a special suit to regulate his anxiety-driven superpower of releasing a stinking cloud noxious enough to bring on unconsciousness. By this point in the series, he is mostly capable of regulating it, and has begun to reluctantly use it as a weapon. Gazo aspires to be a police officer, but fears that Cadel's adoptive father Saul, a detective, will not allow him into the force. Gazo is easily the series' most interesting character, and yet his story lines are all dangling by the end, disappointingly unresolved.

While most of the book's major characters were introduced in the previous books in the series, the book also introduces several characters, all of whom have tantalizing plot hooks that receive no resolution. Cadel is now attending college, and Richard Buckland, who teaches Introductory Programming, pays a particular, strange, and unexplained attention to Cadel. Boyd, another student in the class, is a klutz who always wears fingerless gloves, leading Cadel's friend to insist that Boyd has to be hiding something, in a potential story that is never explored.

There are more students in the class, all of whom are introduced in a "wardriving" surveillance mission: Duke is a hippie with a missing tooth who has lost jobs and girlfriends due to literally spending days at a time playing video games. Egon always dresses in the same sweatshirt and wears the same sullen scowl. Vijay is an easily forgettable boy who shows up to the meeting in an impeccable suit. None of these characters serve any measurable purpose in the plot: they have no motivations, and could just as easily be emotionless cardboard cutouts.

This is all evident of Jinks' tendency to introduce new characters merely as plot objects. These characters are means to an end: they have no story lines of their own, and they make no progress toward being developed characters, rather only as a checkpoint for the plot. Jinks drops hints of development, then fails to follow through on this potential. It's an incredibly sloppy way of writing.

Even while ignoring new characters, Jinks still finds time to ignore the old characters. Cadel's best friend Sonja, a girl with cerebral palsy, is injured early on, and is essentially out of the picture for the remainder of the book. Fiona, Cadel's adoptive mother and newlywed to the detective Saul, does nothing but act confused and fret about Cadel's safety. Even Prosper English, the series' primary antagonist, appears only in the final chapters.

Ultimately, Genius Wars is a readable book, if not an immensely flawed one. The use of technology raises eyebrows (Cadel and Sonja are nearly killed by a rogue text message that activates a Bluetooth connection), interesting characters from past books are shafted in favour of Cadel, and the new characters have no reason to be in the plot. Every theory and speculation of Cadel's is right, and everything in the book is exactly as it appears. The book ends unresolved for virtually every character, and it abounds with messy writing throughout. The Genius Wars is a carelessly written book with flat characterization, few surprises, and a single-minded devotion to its primary character. It's remarkable just how lackluster it is.

I am going to start out by saying that I had not read the first two books in this series before I read "The Genius Wars", but there was enough back-story worked into this installment that I never felt lost or confused.

I enjoyed "The Genius War", finding it to be based upon an interesting premise, though one which might have been arrived at by the following recipe: "Toss a couple of Artemis Fowl books and a volume or two of Harry Potter into a shredder, sift together and bake at 350-deg. for 45 minutes... ".

Seriously though, the adventures of Cadel Greeniaus (née Piggott) and his disparate group of brainiac, computer genius friends and associates are quite entertaining -- from criminal super-hacker in training to boy genius computer expert police associate to mild-mannered high-school-aged college computer science student, Cadel has gone through some changes since his debut in "Evil Genius". There is a lot happening in a short span of time here, but the action is not so rapid-fire as to be difficult to follow. The characters involved are described well enough for a reader who has not read the first two books to have sufficient sense of them to understand how they fit into the story and what their roles are.

Readers who are not too familiar with computer technology and terminology might be a bit at sea, but just as readers of Patrick O'Brien's seafaring tales may follow the larger storyline by glossing over the overtly technically nautical passages by saying to themselves "and then they went aloft and did something clever with the sails", readers who are less than familiar with gigabytes, USB drives, CGI, and CCTV can gloss over these bits by saying to themselves "and then Cadel and his friends did something clever with a computer", freeing themselves to follow the larger storyline, which is that of Cadel realizing that his nemesis, Prosper English, is after him again, and how he goes about tracking him down in order to eliminate that threat from his life. In both examples the more technically savvy reader will find a bit more depth in the story while the less technically adept need not feel left out -- the basic human situations of the tale are, overall, more important than the technical details.

As an American I found the Australian locations exotic; as a Californian, I found the California locations familiar -- this was an agreeable combination. I also found Cadel to be a sympathetic character; a youngster striving for normality and a chance to pursue his talents and interests in a satisfying and useful life. The fact that he must face physical danger (and try to protect his friends from the danger they face just because they are his friends) and intellectual challenges to follow that path is the basis of the story.

I pondered a 4-star rating for this book, but while it is generally well-written, it falls a bit short of my standards for a 4-star read, partially for its slightly derivative premise and partly for the mildly tiresome repetition of the "boy-genius-is-increasingly-frustrated-by-necessity-of-dealing-with-less-brilliant-adults-who-control-his-world" theme (which is also roughly parallel to a recurring theme in the Harry Potter stories). Readers who are in this book's target audience might not discern these aspects, and might well be less discriminating in their assessment of the pacing and the cohesiveness of the plot - overall, it should play well with the target audience.

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