Gordon Korman. Masterminds: Criminal Destiny. New York: Harper, 2016. Print.

This is part two of Gordon Korman’s Masterminds series. While it could be read on its own, Criminal Minds is meant to be read in order. The title suggests the main psychological conflict.

Four young teens have escaped the treacly-nice pseudo-Utopia of Serenity. They discovered that they were cloned from four different notorious criminals. The question is simple—are they genetically programmed to be bad or does it depend on their upbringing? As they say, Nature or Nurture? (The humorous answer is simply, “Either way, it’s your parents’ fault!”)

In this volume of the story, the question is somewhat moot. Technically, they are runaways. Yes, they are the subjects of a cruel science experiment, but to escape they have to steal cars and do other things to evade the Purple People Eaters—a.k.a. the Serenity Security Force.

Gordon Korman’s humorous adventure stories often involve break-ins or break-outs. Most of his Swindle stories had one or the other or both: break into the store of a crooked sports card dealer, break out of a cabin in the woods while being held hostage.

A lot of Korman’s humor comes from fish out of water situations his characters find themselves in such as Born to Rock or the hilarious Gifted. Here is one example.

Remember that our four escapees have been misled so much about the real world that they really do not know a lot about how things work or how they are perceived. For example, the Serenity school taught them that the Boston Tea Party was a literal British tea time where American and English officials cordially negotiated American independence.

When the kids get to a big city, they discover that cloning humans is illegal worldwide. So Amber walks up to a policeman and tells him that she and three of her friends are clones that have recently escaped from a cloning experiment in the New Mexico desert. The next thing she knows, she is being taken in for psychiatric observation.

What does that mean? Another breakout , of course!

The biggest breakout is yet to come. That will involve one of the criminal master minds whom one of the kids is cloned from. There will be no spoilers here!

Criminal Minds is wild and entertaining. One could argue that the novel is not only raising a question about nature vs. nurture but also questions about just government and even just war. The characters themselves are all twelve and thirteen, right around the age that most of us discover that the world can be a pretty unfair and unforgiving place.