Title: Deal with the Devil
Series: Mercenary Librarians
Author: Kit Rocha
Genre: Dystopian Romance
Standalone: This is the first book in a series.
Orphan Black meets the post-apocalyptic Avengers in the vein of Ilona Andrews’ Hidden Legacy series by USA Today and New York Times bestselling author duo Kit Rocha
The United States went belly up 45 years ago when our power grid was wiped out. Too few live in well-protected isolation while the rest of us scrape by on the margins. The only thing that matters is survival. By any means. At any cost.
Nina is an information broker with a mission: to bring hope to the darkest corners of Atlanta. She and her team of mercenary librarians use their knowledge to help those in need. But altruism doesn’t pay the bills—raiding vaults and collecting sensitive data is where the real money is.
Knox is a bitter, battle-weary supersoldier who leads the Silver Devils, an elite strike squad that chose to go AWOL rather than slaughter innocents. Before the Devils leave town for good, they need a biochem hacker to stabilize the experimental implants that grant their superhuman abilities.
The problem? Their hacker’s been kidnapped. And the ransom for her return is Nina. Knox has the perfect bait for a perfect trap: a lost Library of Congress server. The data could set Nina and her team up for years…
If they live that long.
Thoughts: I’ve never seen Orphan Black, but I LOVE the Avengers, and I love Kit Rocha.
Back in 2012, I was on Netgalley and the cover of a book had me opening up the request tab and closing it. I wasn’t a fan of post-apocalyptic books and stories…but the cover it kept drawing me in. So I requested to review the book. You can find my review of Beyond Shame here. To say that this book was life changing is a bit much. But what it did do, was what really good authors can do. It took me out of what has happening in my life at the time and into a world that I could escape into. In this reader’s opinion Kit Rocha is one of the best romance writers writing today.
Flash forward 8 years and Kit Rocha is on my auto-buy list and one of my all-time favorite authors. So when I was given an arc of Deal with the Devil I KNEW I would be dropping everything and reading it. Which I did. And I regret nothing.
One of the things I love about Rocha’s writing is how rich her characters and how realistic her world building is. I can 100% imagine this world that they have created.
Knox and Nina and their crews are as unlike Dallas and Lex as you can get in this world that takes place at the same time as their Beyond series, just on the east coast, and yet there are definite similarities.
Nina is on a mission to books into as many peoples hands as she can. She knows that books have power. Knox is on a mission to save his men. When these two collide because of the machinations of another, well the sparks fly.
I’m not going to say anything about the plot of the book, as I think you need to discover it yourself, but just know you should set some serious time aside as you’ll read from cover to cover, and fall in love with these characters and what has been done to them, and how they’re creating a new life for themselves.
Deal with the Devil is book we didn’t know we needed about librarians and how they impact our world.
Grade A
