Cyborg Seduction by Lisa Lace

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

He’s no longer human. Is he still her first love?

Wrath leads Green Squad, a team of cybernetic soldiers capable of autonomous missions. Cut off from their central command by a communications glitch, Wrath believes his team has been left in the desert to perish. When a group of humans shows up a year later, he’s ready to kill. 

Reporter Rachel Halliday is terrified of cyborgs, but her first assignment at her new job is to cover the retrieval of Green Squad. Though scientists warn the media to keep their distance from the cyborgs, she disobeys and gets captured. Taken to the squad leader, she’s shocked to see that Wrath looks just like Robert, the man she once loved – and had given up for dead. 

Convinced that Rachel is a spy sent to betray him, Wrath doesn’t trust her, but he can’t deny his strange compulsion to protect and possess her. With a military team approaching to take over the retrieval – and memory flashbacks shorting out his system – Wrath is on the verge of remembering everything, only to lose it all over again. Can Rachel help him recover the man he was before it’s too late?

Man vs. Machine vs. Memory

The following ratings are out of 5:
Romance: 💚🩷💙❤️
Spice/Heat: 🌶️🌶️🌶️🌶️
Story/Plot: 📕📗📙📘
World building: 🌏🌍🌎🌏
Character development: 😋😀😉🥰
Narration: 🎙🎙🎙
Narration Type: Solo Narration

Main Characters & Plot Overview

Wrath leads Green Squad, a team of cybernetic soldiers capable of autonomous missions. Cut off from their central command by a communications glitch, Wrath believes his team has been left in the desert to perish. Once a human soldier named Robert, he now has no recollection of his former life, carrying instead a deep and hardened hostility toward all of humanity. His identity has been entirely subsumed by his cybernetic programming, making him a formidable, emotionally closed-off figure whose capacity for trust has been thoroughly erased.

Reporter Rachel Halliday is terrified of cyborgs, but her first assignment at her new job is to cover the retrieval of Green Squad. Though scientists warn the media to keep their distance from the cyborgs, she disobeys and gets captured. Rachel is a young professional eager to make her mark, though her impulsiveness lands her in a dangerous situation she could not have anticipated. She is driven not just by professional ambition but by a deeply personal connection she believes she has discovered.

When she comes face to face with Wrath, the cyborg leader, she can’t help but notice how much he resembles her first love. Robert had joined the military, and not long after, she had been told he’d been killed in battle. Convinced that Rachel is a spy sent to betray him, Wrath doesn’t trust her, but he can’t deny his strange compulsion to protect and possess her. With a military team approaching to take over the retrieval and memory flashbacks shorting out his system, Wrath is on the verge of remembering everything, only to lose it all over again. The central dramatic tension of the novel rests on whether Rachel can reach the man buried beneath the machine before time runs out for both of them.

Highlights & Limitations

This story has action, suspense, and smoking hot sex scenes, along with a guaranteed happy ending. One of the book’s strongest qualities is its emotional core: the idea of a woman fighting to reclaim a lost love who no longer knows he ever existed is genuinely compelling. The flashbacks were fantastic as Wrath remembers bits of his past. These memory sequences add real texture to his character arc and give the romance a bittersweet depth that distinguishes it from more straightforward genre entries.
The book is well-developed and steadily paced to keep your interest.

However, there are some meaningful limitations. Rachel doesn’t seem too concerned or scared that these cyborgs plan to kill her at any moment, seeming rather humdrum about the whole experience, yet has a panic attack when she’s in an underground cave in the dark. This inconsistency in her characterization can undercut the tension Lace is clearly trying to build. There are too many gaps in the story, and the ending was weak. I have seen a few reviews which found the sex scenes rather crude and vulgar, tending to skip over them, which is worth knowing if explicit content is not to your taste, though it is very much a feature of Lace’s brand.

Narration & Performances

Michael Pauley’s performance is one of the audiobook’s genuine strengths. The narrator portrayed the various characters and their emotions well. Michael Pauley narrates and does a wonderful job on this audiobook. Given that the story requires him to voice both a cold, mechanized cyborg leader and an emotionally vulnerable female reporter, the range demanded is considerable. Pauley handles the tonal shifts competently; lending Wrath a convincing rigidity that gradually softens as the memory flashbacks take hold. For audiobook listeners, his steady and clear delivery makes the pacing feel more assured than it might read on the page. That said, I still prefer to have two narrators performing in duet.

Final Thoughts

Cyborg Seduction is an entertaining and fast-moving entry in the Burning Metal series that delivers on its core promise: a sci-fi romance with heart, heat, and a guaranteed happy ending. It is a stand-alone, full-length science fiction romance with no cliffhangers. That accessibility is a real selling point for those who want to dip into the series without committing to the earlier books. The lost-love-as-cyborg premise is imaginative and emotionally rich, even if the execution has some rough edges in Rachel’s characterization and the abruptness of the conclusion. It is touching and poignant, and many find it easy to become emotionally involved with the characters. For fans of the genre who enjoy their science fiction seasoned with romance and steamy content, and who appreciate a capable narrator bringing it to life, this audiobook is a solid and enjoyable listen. Those looking for harder sci-fi world-building or a more nuanced heroine may find it falls a little short, but within its lane, it does what it sets out to do with genuine energy.

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