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Born A Genius
Paperback
Publisher: Mike Johansen
Published: Sep 29 2026
Pages: 120
Weight: 0.33
Height: 0.28 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
Raymond Anderson was born knowing things he had no way of knowing.
By two, he was reading his father's construction manuals and catching errors that had gone unnoticed for decades. By four, he'd found deductions on the family's taxes that tripled their refund. By seven, he'd graduated high school. By thirteen, he held a doctorate that four senior professors couldn't fully follow.
But genius comes with a price. As Raymond's gifts escalate beyond anything the world has a name for - a healer's touch that can undo illness with a single hand, a mind that can bend light and stop bullets, inventions that render soldiers invisible and warships unsinkable - the government he's tried to help starts treating him less like a son and more like a strategic asset. And America isn't the only country watching.
When a foreign coalition known only as KESTREL decides that if they cannot have Raymond, no one will, they move to take him by force. What follows is a desperate three-day captivity, a secret power Raymond has kept hidden even from his protectors, and a Navy SEAL and Marine rescue operation with a razor-thin window to bring him home before he breaks.
He survives. He gives up nothing. But something in him has changed - and the only place left where his mind will not be the most valuable, most hunted thing in the room is somewhere no government can follow: past the edge of the solar system, past everything humanity has ever charted, on a light-speed ship of his own design.
Born a Genius is the story of a boy who was never allowed to be ordinary, the family who fought to protect him anyway, and the journey that finally lets him belong to no one but himself. Equal parts family drama and technothriller, it asks what we owe the people we call brilliant - and what they are allowed, at last, to want for themselves.
M.J. Cross delivers a suspenseful, emotionally grounded novel about genius, sacrifice, and the cost of being needed by everyone except yourself.
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