This Cruel Design (This Mortal Coil Series, book 2)

By Emily Suvada 

Blurb: 
The nightmare of the outbreak is finally over, but Cat’s fight has only just begun.

Exhausted, wounded, and reeling from revelations that have shaken her to her core, Cat is at a breaking point. Camped in the woods with Cole and Leoben, she’s working day and night, desperate to find a way to stop Lachlan’s plan to reprogram humanity. But she’s failing—Cat can’t even control her newly regrown panel, and try as she might to ignore them, she keeps seeing glitching visions from her past everywhere she turns.

When news arrives that the Hydra virus might not be as dead as they’d thought, the group is pushed into an uneasy alliance with Cartaxus to hunt down Lachlan and fix the vaccine. Their search takes them to Entropia, a city of genehackers hidden deep in the desert that could also hold the answers about Cat’s past that she’s been searching for.

But when confronted with lies and betrayals, Cat is forced to question everything she knows and everyone she trusts. And while Lachlan is always two steps ahead, the biggest threat to Cat may be the secrets buried in her own mind.

Review: 
This is the second book to the This Mortal Coil series, I enjoyed the first one a lot so I had high hopes that this one would be just as good but I was a bit disappointed. 

Overall I would say the book is quite quick paced, especially at the beginning. It doesn’t take long for everything to kick off and for exciting scenes. I’m use to quite slow books so it does make a pleasant change for me.

A cute quirk in the book for me was the development of Cat’s and Leoben’s friendship. I just really enjoyed their scenes together properly better than Cat’s scenes with anyone else. One of things I particularly enjoyed was Leoben trying to pick a nickname for Cat and came up with Squid which became a running joke throughout.

Even though I didn’t agree with all the twists I would say there was plenty of them and that helped make the book more interesting and the good ones did shadow the bad twists.

I would say the big difference between this book and the first one is that it was a bit far fetched. What I liked about the first book was the development of science and healing, it was good and not too unrealistic. But in This Cruel Design it seemed to stretch it too far for me to enjoy as much. 

*SPOILERS*

In the first chapter of the book we already have a major plot twist. It turns out Jun Bei is Cat. This is developed further on in the book to the point it gets confusing. I didn’t mind the reveal at the beginning when it came across rather simple. Cat was Jun Bei, but Lachlan changed her appearance to look more like him and wiped her memories so she’d forget. However I started to dislike the twist when it got overcomplicated. Jun Bei was a person of her own inside Cat and it was more of a body invasion which doesn’t make sense, at least to me.

When Dax makes an entrance into this book we see he is now infected with the virus by Cartaxus to encourage him to make a cure quicker. This did come to a shock to me and thought he was going to die, in the end he didn’t. My problem with this was how slow his condition was going considering the strangers that had it were dying really quickly and in the book they kept going on about how fast the virus was killing now and how Dax was as at that stage but yet he lived.

Another problem I had with Dax character was how he ended up being a love interest of Leoben, I just don’t think that made total sense in the series and there wasn’t any hints in the first book. It just seemed a random coupling.

I did like the creation of Anna being a main character, we knew of Anna from the first book but hadn’t met her or knew that much about her. It was good to see this characters storyline develop. I also liked her bad ass attitude but it’s understandable to be that way when you can’t die. 

We also had further development of Cat’s background. We now know that Lachlan was actually her father and Regina ended up being her mother technically as Cat was a clone of the original baby. I liked this storyline and though it fit quite well.

Cole’s development ruined Cole for me. He just wasn’t a nice protective man anymore but more of a threat. Whilst reading I thought Mato was a better match for Cat but then Mato proved to be psycho so in the end I decided non fit. I guess if I was to ship a couple in this series it would be Cat and Leoben.

One of my favourite scenes in this book was when Cat chopped her hand off to help with her escape. That was the most unexpected thing in this book. It was really well written and I also liked how her new hand wasn’t her hand and that it turned out Regina stole it.

Eventually in the book we got to see Agnes again who went missing in the beginning of the first book. I was worried the author was gonna forget to make her a part of the story again and although she didn’t have a big role to play she did help in a small way and her disappearance was explained. 

I believe there is going to be a third book and I’m interested to see how this series plays out but I’m not as excited as I was for this book. As I’m worried it won’t be as good as the first like this one was. For that reason I’m giving it 3 stars.

Rating: 3 runes out of 5 

Check out my review on book 3: (tbc)

 written by Lauren