Finished (E-Reader) - "The Death Cure" and "The Kill Order" by James Dashner (Maze Runner Trilogy, + prequel)

As per the last post, I was reading the Maze Runner Trilogy (and the prequel "The Kill Order") by James Dashner.
Being a little too old for the series target market, I found the series OK, but didn't really "buy" the whole rationale for putting the teens in the maze in the first place.  Ignoring that, the series was OK to read, though there were lots of amazing recoveries from impossible situations ("Hey, there are 1000 guys with machetes and I have a spoon - luckily I hit the first guy on the head with the spoon and everyone else ran away....").
I actually might have liked "The Kill Order" best of the books.  It provides the background information giving some details of what happened prior to the 1st book in the series.  This, at least, seemed plausible - it is the "Maze" idea that leaves me a little cold.

Spoiler:
The basic idea of the books is that there has been a solar event (flares) which baked much of the earth - the area between the Tropic of Cancer and The Tropic of Capricorn are scorching deserts.  Ice caps melted, coastal cities under water.   A new world body, seated in Alaska, is deciding what to do in this new Earth.  They decide that the world can't support all the people, so they unleash a virus which is intended to quickly kill targeted population centres.

However, either through flaws in the virus design, or mutation, the virus doesn't kill everyone quickly - some are naturally immune, and many experience a progressive dementia, devolving to a type of violent zombie-ism,  the main effect of which is that the virus spreads to pretty much the entire population.

The world body must figure out how to cure the plague (oddly, also called "the flare").  Their plan is to set up  experiments where they take immune teens (and some non-immune teens), erase their memories, and put them into a Maze patrolled by killer robots.  The maze changes daily and the pattern of change provides clues.

Presumably, through the process of solving the maze provides information to the neuroscientists about brain mapping that can be used to understand and cure the plague.  Unfortunately, the "successful" candidate must be sacrificed and undergo fatal brain surgery while conscious.

I didn't find the "solution" to fit the "problem" very well.  Though I can imagine that a new world government may decide to sacrifice some population for the good of the whole (though it would be a difficult choice) and unleashing a plague with unforeseen consequences, but I didn't buy the "Maze" as providing any reasonable "plague curing" information worth the trouble.

I might have liked the task better as a "Survivor" contest to mate the winners, or something, to repopulate the planet with the "best" candidates who carry immunity.  The complexity of the maze could have been varied to make sure that the attributes of the "winners" would be those that provide the best species survival opportunities.

I did like the idea of the "memory erasing" and partial memories returning, not being sure who your friends and enemies are, the solar flare causing the rapid climate change etc..  The maze idea was also fine, but didn't really fit (for me) into the world created.

Again, though, I'm not the target age for this book.  My daughter in the target age group loved the book.