Deal with the Devil by Kit Rocha

Summary:
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.

Review:
Deal with the Devil follows a pretty large cast of characters as they’re on a mission to find a library of information that’s thought to be lost. Except only half the team knows the truth of their mission. The team is full of genetically modified and highly trained individuals, some smart, some skilled at shooting or fighting.
Going into this book all I really knew was “mercenary librarians” which was totally the selling point. But I was surprised to find that this story was much more of a romance novel than I anticipated. Knox and his team are trying to rescue their friend, Luna, who has been kidnapped. The price for Luna’s freedom is the delivery of Nina to a not yet disclosed location. So, Knox convinces Nina and her team, Dani and Maya, to join with him and the rest of the Silver Devils to try to find the lost Library of Congress. Much of this book is about the two teams traveling together and getting to know one another. And even though it’s a journey filled with stops and challenges, it’s still a pretty fast-paced story. There’s danger and excitement and the occasional fallen log in the road that’s almost definitely a trap.
I genuinely enjoyed getting to know these characters. I really loved learning more about Nina, Dani, and Maya’s relationship and how they came to create their makeshift library in Atlanta. They all have their own history, their own wounds, but I liked how they worked together and how obvious it was that they cared about one another. Knox’s team was similar. They all worked together on a team named the Silver Devils, but they’ve since fled the big tech company that trained them and sent them on missions. They’ve had to do some pretty morally bad stuff, and they’re all dealing with that. But when they start to actually like Nina and her friends, their mission to turn Nina over to whoever kidnapped Luna gets more complicated than they planned for. I thought the banter and development of relationships between Nina and her team and Knox and his team was the highlight of this story. Between the romance with Nina and Knox and the constant threats of murder from Dani, I genuinely had fun reading this book.
Overall, I think this was a quick and fun story. The world was interesting and mildly terrifying because it was incredibly believable as a potential future. The characters were all entertaining and had their own distinct voices. The only thing that I didn’t like, or really just stuck out to me as odd, was the fact that every single member of both teams was incredibly attractive. Which, sure, it’s a romance-ish novel, but it was mentioned so many times that it felt a bit forced. Instead of showing me that these characters were attracted to one another (which did happen too) it was constantly talked about how stunning and beautiful and fit they all were. This sort of stopped happening after the halfway point in the book, but it was something that stood out to me that I thought was a bit odd. I did really like how the story wrapped up and how the reconciliation happened with the main romance. I’m definitely planning to continue the series and see what trouble these characters will find next.

Keep on reading lovelies, Amanda.