When they are swept away to a hidden academy for training evil geniuses, Otto, a brilliant orphan; Wing, a sensitive warrior; Laura, a shy computer specialist; and Shelby, an infamous jewel thief, plot to beat the odds and escape.

HOW FAR WILL OTTO GO TO PROTECT HIS FRIENDS? Otto Malpense and his friends thought their first year at the Higher Institute of Villainous Education was the most adventurous and exciting that they would ever encounter. They were dead wrong. When Otto and Wing are allowed off campus to attend Wing's father's funeral, they have no idea it's a trap, all part of a lethal plan organized by Cypher, the most ruthless supervillain any of them have ever known. He intends to use them to retrieve the Overlord Protocol, a device that has the capacity to help him take over the world. But when things go terribly wrong, Otto will stop at nothing to hunt him down and make him pay. With the help of Laura, Shelby, Raven, and his former nemesis, Dr. Nero, Otto must find a way to defeat an enemy that has overcome some of the planet's most infamous villains without even breaking a sweat. Because if he doesn't, the world as they know it will be changed forever.

H.I.V.E. (Higher Institute of Villainous Education) is a top-secret school of applied villainy where children with a precocious gift for wrongdoing are sent to develop their talents into criminal mastermind. After all, 'villains have the best lines and wear the best costumes'. One small catch is that the children cannot leave until training is complete, six years later. With villainy comes a certain freedom of thought, and every year one student in particular will show exceptional talent - after all, it takes the best to produce the worst. This year there are two students: Otto Malpense and his new friend Wing Fanchu are both exceptionally bad, and they are definitely not keen on being held against their will for six long years . . .

As a final battle with Overlord looms near, the H.I.V.E. heroes are up against an unimaginably dangerous weapon. Bad news for the Higher Institute of Villainous Education, aka H.I.V.E.: Overlord is reborn and has developed the chilling ability to move from body to body, erasing the host’s personality—and ultimately killing them. Overlord must find Otto, the only host designed to truly contain him, and for that he needs to know the location of H.I.V.E. He also plans to take control of a secret U.S. Army facility that is home to the Autonomous Weapon Program, a computer-controlled system uniquely vulnerable to Overlord’s control. In the face of these threats, Nero is forced to activate Zero Hour, a plan designed to deal with any member of G.L.O.V.E—the Global League of Villainous Enterprises—who is on the brink of true global domination. Nero also knows that Otto must not be allowed to fall into Overlord’s hands, and a desperate race across the globe begins.

Otto races against the clock to rescue his friends from a rival organization, but as he desperately fights for his friends' lives, he ends up facing a deadly enemy who is a twisted product of his own bloodline.

A new era is beginning in the villainous world of H.I.V.E. as civil war looms, forcing Otto and his friends to take sides—perhaps against each other. Scheming, extorting, menacing, and general evilness are nothing new in the world of villainy—indeed, it’s expected, especially at the Higher Institute of Villainous Education. But even so, there have always codes of conduct. Until now. In an attempt to purge the Global League of Villainous Enterprises of its more destructive elements, Dr. Nero has underestimated the cunning and resources of those who oppose him. Meanwhile, Otto and the rest of the Alpha stream have been sent to begin their most feared exercise, the Hunt, in the icy wastes of Siberia. But there is a traitor in their midst. The first strike against Nero will be a strike against the Alpha stream. Villain-kind is on the brink of civil war.

High-octane adventures continue in the eighth book of the H.I.V.E. series, and the team of supremely talented criminals is forced to question everything they know about life as villains. Otto and Raven are desperate to rescue their friends from the clutches of Anastasia Furan, head of the evil Disciples organization. First they must track down the location of the Glasshouse, the prison where Furan trains children to become ruthless assassins. But Otto is also being hunted. In the three months since his “expulsion” from H.I.V.E., The Artemis Section—an elite intelligence division that goes after the toughest targets and reports only to the US president—has had an opportunity to locate him. Set against the backdrop of a daring high-tech prison break, nothing is quite as it seems in Deadlock.