Cadel Piggott has been seeing a psychologist since he was seven, ostensibly for his own good. In fact Thaddeus Roth has spent a decade quietly grooming him into a criminal mastermind, grading his childhood pranks like homework and steering him toward increasingly serious fraud with the patient, encouraging tone of a favorite teacher. By fourteen, Cadel is bored, brilliant, friendless, and about to be enrolled at the Axis Institute, a university that teaches infiltration, poisons, and larceny to teenagers with the right sort of talent.

A campus novel with a body count adjacent

The setup is gleefully absurd — a literal school for supervillains, complete with a course catalog — and Jinks plays almost all of it straight, which is exactly why it works. The faculty are believably petty and status-obsessed in the way real academics are, just with a higher rate of attempted murder. Cadel's coursework and rivalries read like any boarding-school novel until you remember what the diplomas are actually for.

Every institution trains you to want what it's selling. This one is just more honest about the tuition.— Prakhar Gautam

What elevates the book past its premise is Cadel himself, who has been so thoroughly isolated and instrumentalized by every adult in his life that he genuinely does not have the categories to recognize what's being done to him until something — a single unmanipulated act of kindness from an unlikely source — gives him a reference point he never had. Watching a child work out, from first principles, that he has been the victim of the very cleverness he was praised for is a slower and sadder story than the jacket copy suggests.

It doesn't fully commit to that darkness — this is YA, and the plot machinery around Cadel's parentage and Thaddeus's endgame moves the book back toward caper territory whenever things threaten to get too heavy. I didn't mind; the caper is fun. I just noticed the book had a sadder, better novel available to it and only reached for it in glimpses.