Gordon Korman. Masterminds: Payback. New York: Harper, 2017. Print.

Brand new (dated 2017!) from Gordon Korman, one of our favorite YA writers—Masterminds: Payback is the third installment of the Masterminds series, and it does bring the tale to a close. We highly recommend that readers take in the books in the order that they were written.

Part two, Masterminds: Criminal Destiny, left two of our cloned protagonists escaping both the law and criminals down a Texas river. The other two manage to wangle rides to Los Angeles where they start a Girl Scout cookie scam. The fifth friend, well, he turned out to be a traitor under the influence of P. J. Rackoff (sounds like Bernie Madoff?) from whom he was cloned.

The character are at loose ends. Tamara Dunleavy—the retired billionaire backer of Project Osiris, the human cloning experiment—has denied all knowledge. Some of the Purple People Eaters, the security detail from the experimental village in New Mexico, are actively looking for them. Except for some notorious criminals, no one believes their story. They have no money and nowhere to go.

Two manage to get to Chicago where they connect with Gus Alabaster, the gangland don whom Malik Bruder was cloned from. When he tells Gus that he is his son, everyone believes him because he looks just like Gus when Gus was younger. But now Gus has been granted parole from prison because he is terminally ill. Still, Malik and Amber have some time to learn the ways of organized crime and of helping in an urban soup kitchen. When Gus’s men peel off a hundred dollar bill for a tip each time Malik does an errand for them, he tells himself, “I could learn to like this.”

One of the recurring questions among each of the cloned kids is simply this: Was I born evil? Am I to be a criminal, too? At times I sure have been acting and living like one.

That is not an uncommon question in the history of the world. Yes, Oedipus asked it. But if we examine ourselves, maybe all of us can ask the same question. Solzhenitsyn quotes a fellow prisoner:

“…if you go over your life with a fine-tooth comb and ponder it deeply, you will always be able to hunt down that transgression of yours for which you have now received this blow.” (The Gulag Archipelago II.612)

Eli and Tori go to Los Angeles. People recognize Eli as the spitting image of a teen TV star, a Zac Efron type. Eli gets to meet him, but this raises more questions. Are he and the teen heartthrob related? Is this actor another clone? No spoilers here, but it is complicated.

Masterminds: Payback ends up in a wild melee in the Bahamas involving a water park, a stolen boat, a huge fish tank, and some Purple People Eaters. In other words, it is typical but crazy Gordon Korman. As always, there is a lot of humor. One portion of the Bahama adventure does seem similar to one from one of the Swindle tales, but it is a lot of fun.

By the way, this is the third and last book in the Masterminds trilogy. Things do get wrapped up, and justice is served. We have gotten to know and like the four or five main characters. Most of us do wonder sometimes where we came from and whether we really do fit in anywhere. We would not be shocked if, like the Swindle stories, more Masterminds tales appear in the future.