Skulduggery Pleasant: Mortal Coil Review (4.5/5)

There are lots of things to hate about Mortal Coil, the fifth book in the Skulduggery Pleasant series by Derek Landy. For one, the 600 page length of the new hardback that would often be used to pack loads of major events and twists in is here mostly used as a method of Valkyrie withholding the terrible truth she discovered in Dark Days (4/5) from Skulduggery, her friends and her family, and this sense of distrust and eventual betrayal outstays its welcome far quicker than it should of given this release's close proximity to that of the fourth book (released in April 2010, Landy clearly intended this year's double-release as a way of changing things for the series, but this gaping flaw leaves me to wonder whether the short time he must have had to write 2 books for 1 year prevented him from writing at his best, found in the original Pleasant novel). Also, new characters introduced such as Tesseract for the majority of the time have little-to-no in depth characterisation, leaving readers to use the image on the back of the lavish cover or their imagination to decrypt who this assassin really is. Why, then, do you see such a high score above? Simply put, once the book finds its pace (around the half-way mark, at 300 or so pages), it doesn't let the attention of the reader escape, and while there's nothing utterly groundbreaking here in the writing or in terms of series-changing twists, the events of the last 100 pages are truly shocking for the franchise as a whole, with the final chapter in particular striking in the mind simply for the return of someone thought previously to be dead. Though some may be put off by its length, Mortal Coil (eventually) is a gripping tale in the Pleasant that deserves to be read by fans!