Deal with the Devil is Orphan Black meets the post-apocalyptic Avengers by USA Today and New York Times bestselling author duo Kit Rocha.
Nina is an information broker with a mission—she and her team of mercenary librarians use their knowledge to save the hopeless in a crumbling America.
Knox is the bitter, battle-weary captain of the Silver Devils. His squad of supersoldiers went AWOL to avoid slaughtering innocents, and now he's fighting to survive.
They’re on a deadly collision course, and the passion that flares between them only makes it more dangerous. They could burn down the world, destroying each other in the process…
Or they could do the impossible: team up.
This is the first book in a near-future science fiction series with elements of romance.
3.5 out of 5 stars.
When I watched
Pacific Rim for the first time, the story confused the hell out of me at the beginning. Right up until the brown-haired white protagonist and his brown-haired white rival were on the screen at the same time because, as it turns out, I hadn’t realized they were two different actors playing two different characters and had been trying to parse the movie assuming they were the same character. (Yes, one of them was Australian and the other American. I feel really stupid for not noticing the accents.) But after that was straightened out, I enjoyed the movie.
This is roughly similar to my experience reading
Deal with the Devil. On the surface you’d think I’d love it, and I thought I might when I requested it via NetGalley. The series is
Mercenary Librarians and I am a librarian. I love mercenary romance. There are angsty supersoldiers in it and I Iove me an angsty supersoldier. There are proactive women, post-apocalyptic surroundings, a team romance setup, and all of this should have added up to something I adored, but it was...fine.
Much like
Pacific Rim it took me a while to identify one issue: voice. A distinctive narrative voice is what I really love in a book, and
Deal with the Devil just didn’t get there. The characters' dialogue sounded enough alike that I found myself having to consciously tag their names with their roles and periodically look back a page or two to check who was saying what again in order to distinguish between the four guys on one team and two of the three women on the other. (If you’re wondering: Dani and Nina. Maya was more of an individual.)
And, like
Pacific Rim, somewhere between a third and half of the way into the book the characters started to distinguish themselves--possibly because Rocha began seeding chapters from those other characters' points of view--and it became easier to read.
Unlike
Pacific Rim, it wasn't over-the-top enough for the concept. When you have POST-APOCALYTPIC MERCENARY LIBRARIAN ROMANCE as the elevator pitch, you kind of expect something to live up to that. I wasn't looking for
The Road Warrior, but I think the aim should have been a bit closer to that than the original
Mad Max, which is where it hit.
I admit I haven't read any of Rocha's other romances and maybe this is exactly what Rocha readers want. If not, then I assume, given the publisher, that it might have been an editorial decision to keep some of the usual romance traits and tropes but to pull back on the ridiculous ones and exaggerated characterization, so as to appeal to a new audience. If so, I think it missed the mark because it removes some of the charm that the best SF romances possess. If you forgive me another
Pacific Rim metaphor: I was looking for the equivalent of the scene where a jaeger picks up a container ship and uses it as a club BECAUSE OF COURSE IT DOES and what I got was the version where that was edited out because someone complained that container ships are flexible so they don't get ripped apart while at sea and in reality it would have broken under its own weight.
Also there wasn't enough of the librarian part of
mercenary librarians. Judging by the ending, this is an aspect they're working up to--you can consider this one the origin story, perhaps--but if I'm promised MERCENARY LIBRARIANS then by damn I'm expecting MERCENARY LIBRARIANS.
So there you have it. This sounds like I’m ripping it apart, and I don’t feel that poorly about the book, but I’m disappointed when I envision the book I was expecting, given the concept. I saw the publisher, I saw the genre, I saw the synopsis and I was hopeful that it would take the bits I love about the SF romance genre and elevate them, but...it’s completely fine. Readable, entertaining...fine.
You might not have the same problem that I do—I’m probably in a minority with my
Pacific Rim troubles and inability to distinguish between brown-haired white men speaking in different accents after all—and I’ll still be recommending
Deal with the Devil to readers looking for SF or mercenary romance because I think a lot of people will enjoy it, but it’s not my favorite book.
It’s totally fine. Three and a half out of five stars.
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And hey, don’t go tweeting or emailing the authors and tagging this and other reviews. That’s just rude. If they care, they already have Google alerts set up that will flag their pseudonym and this title, and they don't need you to tell them.
