H.I.V.E.

H.I.V.E., Mark Walden,  is a series about extraordinary teenagers living a life of extraordinary action and extraordinary evil. 
     Otto Malpense showed up one day on the front step of an orphanage. Eventually he took it over and got the Prime Minister of England fired.  Laura Brand hacked into a military base near her house and used the top secret equipment to hack into her friend's phone accounts.  Shelby Trinity is a world-class jewelry thief.  Wing Fanchu's parents might be dead, but when they were alive they were most certainly involved with the top-secret villain agency, G.L.O.V.E.  The four unlikely, and only partially evil, teenagers are shipped off to a secret training facility designed for turning truant teenagers into real, bad, and smart criminals.  When Overlord, an artificially intelligent computer program, breaks loose, G.L.O.V.E. is thrown into chaos, and only these four teenagers and an able assassin will be able to stop the menace.  Who will die?  Who will escape?  And who will become the most powerful weapon since the atomic bomb?

Yeah . . . So, anyway, I consider these books a beach read.  Very light on the brain, and not very hard to digest.  The cliffhangers are pretty lame as well, because Mark Walden practically tells you what's going to happen next. 
      There are also way to many characters.  I mean, we have the main handful:  Otto, Laura, Wing, Shelby, Nigel, Franz, Lucy, Max Nero, Cypher, Raven, Professor Pike, H.I.V.E.mind, Overlord, and I'm pretty sure I missed someone.  Next to that are the secondary characters:  Furan, Mrs. Leon, Colonel Francisco, Chief Lewis, and I'm forgetting like twenty because there are so many.  You really have to remember them all, or read the books in a tight sequence or else you forget them all.  And it is pretty crucial that you remember them all. 
      For most of the books, there is only one villain, and that is Overlord.  He comes in around the edges, and you don't quite know he's there until the end.  It's pretty clever, I have to admit.
      The whole thing would be pretty clever.  Otto is basically the evil Harry Potter, albeit for the fact that he doesn't have any magical powers.  As I said in my rant on Catherine Jinks's Evil Genius, everybody is doing a spin-off of Harry Potter. 
       Also, and I know this sounds stupid, but the evil people aren't evil enough.  Like, they're nice to each other.  At least, they are not actively trying to kill each other.  Until Rouge, but that's different.  The criminals are working together, and I can't figure out if it give me the creeps or if it's just straight up weird. 
       Also, there is also supposed to be some wickedly awesome, super-assassin who never gets beaten, named Raven.  Well, in the first two books, that's fine.  She's the super-assassin she's supposed to be.  But in the other books she gets her rear end kicked on almost a chapterly basis!  Okay, so, maybe not that often, but it sure seems like it. 
       I know I'm making these books out to be the worst books ever written, but they aren't.  They aren't on my 'buy immediately' list, or even my 'wow, that really made an impression on me' list, but they make a list of 'hey, that's not half bad'.  A resounding approval, I know.  The plots, though, are not what you would normally find in a novel--more like something you would find in a Marvel Comic or an Arnold Swar-- I don't know how to spell that, so let's just say a "Terminator"-like movie-- with people getting chased around with helicopters that are shooting machine guns at them, breaking into buildings in New York City with the NYPD surrounding the bottom of the building, blowing up enemy bases in the Amazon Jungle.
       The books are, in this order, The Higher Institute for Villainous Eduction, Overlord Protocol, Escape Velocity, Dreadnought, Rouge, and there's another one that's supposed to be coming out soon, Zero Hour.   I liked The Higher Institute . . ., Escape Velocity, and Rouge the best.  Dreadnought made next to no sense, but Overlord Protocol wasn't too bad. 
         If you're looking for an action book in which there is some blood, some gore, and a different vantage point these are your go-to material.  These books serve as a reminder that battling the forces of good is not all that it's chalked up to be.