The Devil you Know
Kit Rocha
Mercenary Librarians #2



The Devil you Know, book 2 in Kit Rocha’s Mercenary Librarians trilogy is a fantastic non-stop post-apocalyptic/sci-fi fantasy. This futuristic action-packed look at big brother vs the little guy features the slow burning steamy love story of Maya a former data courier to a once all powerful TechCorps executive and Gray the Silver Devil who’s living on borrowed time thanks to an implant rejection. These two are fantastic players and the definition of a tragic love story and readers will enjoy their journey and find out if they overcame the mountainous obstacles that stand in their way. Rocha gives her audience a fast-paced edgy narrative that readers can really sink their fantasy loving teeth into along with some dystopic backdrops while digging deeper into the base storyline of the trilogy about the Librarians and the Silver Devils. We also get a terrific catch up on the characters both good and evil introduced in book one as well as a fantastic plot unique to this novel and a hint of what’s coming in the finale. Fans of the genre, authors like Gina Showalter or Jennifer Ashley will find this novel hard to put down.

It’s taken a while, but Maya is finally settling in with her new adopted family of genetically modified ex TechCorp agents and the super-warriors known as the Silver Devils all who escaped their respective corrupt government agencies. They have banded together to try to save their war-torn decaying piece of America by providing the starving, fragile citizens with both need and wants and at the same time trying to bring down the crooked government agency known as TechCorps, especially when they learn that TechCorps is trafficking genetically enhanced children. Maya’s willing to go down fighting because she knows exactly what these kids are going through. Luckily, she’s got both The Mercenary Librarians and The Silver Devils on her side and she’s got Gray, the Silver Devils sniper who would walk through fire for her. This pair may wish for a future but they’ve got a lot going against them too.

This is the second book in Kit Rocha's Mercenary Librarians trilogy, which blends dystopian hyper-corporate-post-post-apocalypse thriller with sexy romance between attractive, quippy, traumatised super-soldiers. And what a fun genre blend this turns out to be, especially in the hands of an author duo who know how to work the angles of dystopia to bring out very hot tropes around hurt/comfort, negotiated boundaries and selective vulnerability, while also taking the dangers of the world seriously and building a solution that is primarily about community, not the individual actions of very sexy people. That overall arc isn't designed to be encapsulated in this middle book, so while The Devil You Know will be intelligible to a reader who hasn't read the first book in the series (Deal With the Devil), it won't have its whole impact; nor are all the chickens coming home to roost until we finish Dance With the Devil, which is gazing at me as sexily as a paperback can from my TBR shelf.

The catalyst for romance across the trilogy is the meeting of a trio of genetically enhanced women (the titular Mercenary Librarians) and a group of male mercenaries implanted with supersoldier tech chips (The Silver Devils), both of whom have escaped from the TechCorps, the corporation which controls power in Atlanta, Georgia after a tech apocalypse led to the collapse of former society. In Deal With the Devil, an exciting journey of double crossing shenanigans led to the pairing off of Mercenary Librarian leader Nina and her Silver Devil counterpart Knox; in this book, we turn to the story of Grey, the menacing but secretly-quite-soft sniper of the Silver Devils, and Maya, whose genetic engineering means she is incapable of forgetting anything and whose past as a data courier means that she is a walking repository of incriminating facts about TechCorps leadership, and that they will stop at nothing to kill her. Maya lives with technicolour memories of past trauma and is convinced that her mind will, at some point, stop working on her entirely; Grey has just been handed a death sentence as his brain chip is malfunctioning and the only means to repair it lies with the evil corporation he's defected from. The two are immediately and obviously drawn to each other, but there's just so much baggage, so it's time for a slow burn to see if these crazy kids can come together before time runs out on either of them (except it's romance, so there's a HEA, so time isn't running out on anyone we care about in this circumstance).

Unlike its predecessor, whose action side was heavily connected to Nina and Knox's relationship, The Devil You Know doesn't integrate the non-romance angle of the plot (the gang attempting to intercept the smuggling of a group of the next generation of genetically enhanced kids) as effectively, but it does create reasons for Maya in particular to use her strengths, and develop new ones, with Grey's guidance and support. TechCorps, and the main antagonist in particular, come across as cartoonishly villainous at points, but this is probably because we all exist in a state of denial about the ethics of corporations and how they might behave in a post-apocalyptic world, and it also just works for the kind of story that this is. The Devil You Know can be slow, but it knows where its going and while it gives us the promised HEA for its main couple, there are a few knife twists to set up for the final book (featuring Dani and Rafe, the commitment-averse ones who have been radiating sexual tension for two books now and are going to be fake dating in Dance with the Devil) and I'm very intrigued to see whether it sticks the landing.

On the one hand, I feel like I really enjoyed this book, but on the other, I wonder if I would have liked this book as much if I hadn’t just read the entire Beyond series plus the Gideon’s Riders series before getting to this series. Those were all re-reads, but now the stories are fresh in my mind as I was reading this

I love a series where I’m in it for the long game. It took the Beyond series 9 novel sized books (not including the novellas in-between) to take down the powers that be in Eden. But it’ll (maybe) take 3 books to take down the corporations that lives up on the Hill of Atlanta in this series? I feel like the authors have said there were plans for more books with these characters since there ARE a few teases here for some more characters getting paired up, so I just wonder WHERE we’re going to end up at the end of book 3. Will anything be resolved yet? I guess I'm going to find out.

Because as much as I love Maya and Gray in this book, I wouldn’t say the external plot in this is moving very fast. There’s a slow(ish) burn romance going on, but the overarching plot doesn’t feel as pressing as, say, book 8 in the Beyond series as if we’re supposed to be in the penultimate book and the next book, stuff has to go down. So I do see where some of the reviews are coming from when they say…nothing happens in this book. I mean, things DO happen, but slowly and a lot of the “action” scenes is are situated at the beginning and at the end.

Content notes include violence, death, kidnapping, torture, threat of impending death/health complications, human trafficking, and adults manipulating the lives of children.

I want to say this book takes place a month after the events in book 1, but I could be wrong about that because "a few months" is mentioned multiple times and so I’m just kind of confused about that whole timeline. I listened to this book on audiobook so I think I just missed the clarification. The book starts off with Maya and Conall working surveillance in a van while Nina, Knox, Dani, and Rafe are breaking into a facility to retrieve a package for a client. It’s a mission that takes a turn when the crew uncovers a human trafficking ring.

There’s a whole plot here where the team is trying to find other children who might be kidnapped and trying to find the people behind the trafficking ring. But Maya, unlike Nina and Dani, was not trained to be a soldier since she was a child. She remembers things. She remembers everything anyone has ever said, and anything anyone has ever done. She was a Data Courier for an executive VP lady called Birgitte Skovgaard. It was Maya’s job to remember things considered too sensitive to be written down. Maya is intelligent and her brain is unmatched, but physically on a team of supersoldiers? She needs to be trained harder than the rest of them in how to fight in combat.

And that’s where Gray comes in. Gray is part of the Silver Devils squad and was trained by the Protectorate because he had nowhere else to go. He’s someone who is very good at guns, and is especially good as his job as a sniper.

I have to be honest, Gray did not really make an impression on me in the first book. Like, he had his moment with Maya during one scene, but that was it. He’s just a very quiet character, and he’s just NICE. He’s not the leader like Knox, he’s not the friendly computer genius Conall, and he’s not as extroverted as Rafe. So, out of all the guys, it feels like he’s overshadowed by everyone else's presence. Even here in this book, I feel like I LIKE him, and I can see how he’s perfect for Maya, but for an entire book about Maya and Gray? Well.

Their book just feels super toned down. An opposite of Nina and Knox, if you will. You have the entire crew basically take off to do a mission at one point and Maya and Gray are left alone. Maya is just scanning documents and helping out people who need help in their little neighborhood, and Gray is resting. The only thing that kind of heightens the risk of impending doom in this book is that the implants the Protectorate soldiers all have that makes them into super soldiers? Gray’s body is starting to reject the implant and he’s dying.

It’s only because I am familiar with Kit Rocha’s works that I was not entirely angsting whether or not he lived or died. I fully believed the characters would figure out a way to save him in the end and Maya and Gray would get their HFN. Even the possibility of him dying didn’t really hook its claws into my brain. I have been known not to handle books well when that sense of dread just really overtakes a story. But I did wonder HOW he was going to survive and it’s interesting to see where the story went with that.

At the end of the last book, we find out that a character we assumed was dead throughout book one turns out NOT to be dead. But I almost forgot about Mace for a minute even though I literally read these books back-to-back, because he doesn’t show up immediately in this book. It takes awhile. So, if you're expecting him to turn up on the first page, you've got to wait. It was interesting to see what kind of person he would turn out to be after the horrors he’s been subjected to, but what’s more interesting is WHO he’s supposed to end up with. I am interested, I am invested, and I NEED THEIR BOOK NOW. I don’t want to spoil too much, but it’s super obvious once you read this book.

Conall also gets shipped up in this book? The moment he describes Max, like before we even get a name for the man, I was like OH HE’S THE ONE. And honestly, by the description of Max, it sounds like he would run more with the O’Kanes than anything else. I’m super intrigued by the man and I want to know his entire backstory because he is currently an enigma.

I really just have one major bone to pick with this story. Everyone goes through all that work to help the Silver Devils fake their deaths in the end of book 1 so that the Protectorate doesn’t keep looking for Knox, Gray, Conall, and Rafe, and you’re telling me they just tell EVERYONE their names still and don’t try to hide their identity at all? I get that everyone from their past lives refer to each other with their code designations, but it’s not like their actual names were a secret they never told anyone else? Maya changed her name after Nina helped fake her death, so why didn’t anyone else consider having a different identity? That is the main thing that bugged me about this story.

And I guess the other thing I’d mention is that Luna is barely in this story at all. She was kidnapped in the first book and all Knox and his team talked about in that book was how vital she was to keeping them all alive when their implants needed maintenance. But she all but disappeared in this book. Why is she suddenly such a nonentity? She still randomly shows up, but I swear we see and interact more with her aunt than with her. I thought she’d be a character that would get her own book at some point, but maybe not. Where did she go?

I want to say Gray is a white character (that's a confusing sentence but you all know what I mean), but it is mentioned more casually that Maya is Black. The book cover reflects this. This series takes place in a post-apocalyptic world so I do give more grace to how the characters are written. I will say it's better than the Beyond series, where everything felt much more vague in those books until we got the cover redesigns and saw what the authors meant for the female characters to look like.

The only thing about reading all of these books back-to-back is that I think I liked the story more when everything with the timeline and places felt super vague. Now we have dates and specifics in the series and I don’t think I’m a big fan of that. I liked the vagueness of when the world went to hell in a handbasket with the Flares, and now we have so many dates in the memos and events that have happened? I don’t like it. But maybe I’m the only one who doesn’t like all that and people love their details. I don’t know. I got used to the vagueness of the Beyond series and how anything could happen anytime in the future, and now we're suddenly in the 2080s.

We do learn that O’Kane liquor has somehow made its way to Atlanta. How has Dallas expanded operations into the East Coast? He is a man with his eye on expanding his business so I shouldn’t be surprised. I would LOVE to see the O'Kanes and the Atlanta crew to meet up somehow and some point even though they're on opposite sides of the United States.

So. The audiobook narration. This is where I have major problems.

I think we have found the word Lidia Dornet, the audiobook narrator, struggles with the most. It’s the word “kudzu”. It’s a devil of a plant that grows everywhere and it’s near impossible to get rid of, and it’s a very well known nuisance in southern states. The narrator gets the pronunciation right the first time it’s mentioned? The pronunciation gets a little weird the second time like she couldn’t remember how to say it correctly, and then she fully gave up the rest of the time the word came up and reverted back to how she was saying it in the first book. I just don’t understand.

The narrator sounds super peppy in this book when she’s voicing Maya, like almost giving Maya an air of innocence with the way she sounds. It’s not bad. But she’s not consistent with the voices she gives all the characters, and it’s SO hard to figure out who’s talking sometimes because there’s no indication who’s who from the voices she gives her characters. I’m sure it’s more obvious in the text when characters are speaking back and forth and it’s easier to follow along with context clues, but I’m having a heck of a time with following along in audio.

The narrator also randomly gives characters southern accents. It’s NEVER consistent so you never know who’s suddenly going to have an accent and when they’re not. I didn’t have an issue with any other Kit Rocha audiobook narrators (Lucy Malone, Rebecca Estrella, and Tatiana Sokolov for the Beyond series and Gideon's Riders series), but I just don’t think Lidia Dornet can handle a large cast of characters in an audiobook. She’s a good enough narrator, but she is NOT a large cast narrator, you know? She does not have her hands wrapped around who's who and what each character should sound like throughout the books.

There’s also a lot of parts in this audiobook where it’s obvious things got added in during post? Because the audio quality is very different from the surrounding text and you can tell sentences got randomly edited and dropped in. It’s not the worst thing, but it is very, very obvious.

For the story, I do like that we see Maya grow as a character and really learn to embrace her skills and treat the knowledge in her brain not as a hindrance, but something she can use. I liked her dynamic with Gray and I thought their training sessions together were fun. I like a new character we meet in this book, a child who decides to call herself Rainbow. We also see how Ava (Nina's clone sister and kind of villain from book 1) tries to apologize in the most Ava way possible (which is by smothering everyone with gifts and presents). I thought the diary entries in-between chapters was much easier to follow in this book over the report style format in the first book. I liked how this series still keeps to the classic Kit Rocha style where we mainly still have POV chapters (in third-person) told from Maya and Gray’s perspectives, but we also see chapters from other characters' perspectives as well.

Overall, I feel like I liked the book well enough, but Maya and Gray’s dynamic were just very lowkey in comparison to Nina and Knox. I feel like there was even more happening between Maricela and Ivan in book 3 of the Gideon’s Riders series than what we see here. I appreciate Maya and Gray but I’m ready for hot, burning sexual tension and the danger that is Dani and Rafe in the next book, so I’m going to jump right into that one.

Sex scenes were a major barrier to entry when I was first getting into romance novels. I’d been bamboozled by a mindset, common among English majors, wherein fictional sex and any non-contemptuous perspective on embodiment were well beneath the notice of the serious reader. In fairness to my younger self, the tenor of the sex scenes historically allowable by the literary establishment is grim, my friends. It’s all abjection and solipsism and mortification and derision; it’s all ableism and sizeism and misogyny and discrimination. Sex scenes in literary fiction are often designed to highlight the risibility of living inside a flesh prison (as compared with the lofty and un-embodied life of the mind), and one major litmag invented an entire award whose explicit purpose was to shame authors out of ever writing sex scenes at all. Exceptions to this rule exist to the precise extent that folks of marginalized identities, particularly queer writers, have been able to carve out space for themselves as writers and decision-makers within the genre and the book industry.

Sex scenes in romance novels aren’t some magical utopia where all the euphemisms are on point and every type of body finds acceptance. But they are a rebuke to the idea of bodies as flesh prisons, and at their best they are a truly joyful celebration of the liberatory potential of embodiment and pleasure.

Writing duo Kit Rocha recently released the third and final book in their Mercenary Librarians series, Dance With the Devil, which follows a group of genetically enhanced women fighting to save their community in a post-apocalyptic America. Nina was engineered to be a supersoldier defending the all-powerful TechCorps; she was the fighter in her clone set of three (her two sisters, a tactician and an empath, are long lost to her). Maya’s brain was altered to give her perfect recall as a data courier, keeper of the company’s secrets, which makes her a high priority for the company to recover now that she’s living a life free of them. Finally, Dani was genetically enhanced and mentally modified to make her the perfect bodyguard-cum-assassin as part of the Executive Security team for TechCorps. Now free from the company, the three women have scraped together a community of mutual aid, protection, and care. All they have to do is hold onto it.

Enter the Silver Devils, a squad of TechCorps supersoldiers who have gone rogue from their handlers. Like our heroines, they have been genetically modified to suit the purposes of the company that employs and owns them. Like our heroines, they are hot and competent: Knox, their leader; Gray, the sniper; tactician Rafe; plus a tech guy you don’t have to worry about because he is not getting his own book (at least not right now).

It’s become a truism that trauma lives in the body, but for Nina’s and Knox’s crew, that’s literally true. Each of them has been subject to experimentation, torture, modification, and control, and they are all grappling with what that means about who they are and who they can be. Building community offers one path out of their traumatic history; sex and romance another. Just before Nina and Knox have sex for the first time—Knox fully aware that he plans to double-cross Nina’s team in order to protect his own—Nina says this:

Don’t you ever get sick of being the steady one? The one who’s never allowed to fuck up? Don’t you ever get tired?

Both of them are devoted leaders of their crews, both aching with guilt and regret over the people in their lives they haven’t been able to save from the evil powers that tried so hard to break their bodies and minds. In each other’s arms, though, they’re able to set down all of those things. When Knox mentions that he typically has to hold back during sex, to avoid doing damage to ordinary mortals with his super strength, Nina reminds him, “It’s not so easy to hurt me,” giving them both permission to enjoy the full experience of sex.

Nina and Knox each come to realize that they can want something–or someone–for themselves without that want becoming a liability. Instead it’s a strength: When they’re forced into a show-fight where one of their lives is (supposed to be) forfeit, and their physical intimacy gives them the edge they need. “He felt every move she was going to make before she made it, as in tune with her now as he’d ever been in bed,” Knox reflects, just before he and Nina sent a silent signal to their teams to attack the bad guys in a climactic showdown. Their mutual trust and familiarity is exactly what makes it possible for them to keep leading their teams.

The Devil You Know’s Maya does not have Nina’s responsibilities. Instead, she’s grappling with a mind that’s been altered to give her perfect recall, which comes with a side of sensory processing issues. She’s never had sex, in part because she hasn’t made it a priority, but in part because she doesn’t know how to experience the sensory pleasure of sex without becoming overloaded. On top of that, the last man who cared about her was tortured to death in front of her, as a means of making her comply. It’s not exactly a recipe for satisfactory boning. Despite the ticking clock counting down the days until his untimely demise, Gray is willing to wait as long as it takes for Maya to feel comfortable.

Her relationship with Gray isn’t exclusively, or even primarily, about sex. Their shared scenes often take place in the training room, as Gray teaches Maya to use her super senses to defend herself. For most of her life, her genetic modifications have made her vulnerable, but under Gray’s tutelage, she begins to see how she can reclaim her body and mind and use them for her own purposes. When they do the deed, Maya is cognizant of every one of her senses—smelling “a hint of pine” from dish soap, “the salty taste” and “shock[ing] heat” of his skin, the memory of music they danced to, “the low bass throbbing through her,” and “the abrasion from the hair on his chest.”

“Is it supposed to feel this good?” she asks him, experiencing for the first time the potential pleasure of her heightened senses, rather than simply being aware of how they limit her. Sexual desire, and ultimately its consummation, gives Maya the entry point she needs to stop fighting against her heightened senses and eidetic memory, and instead to turn them to her advantage. Ultimately, when Maya and Gray are captured by TechCorps and their lives are on the line, it’s their time together (in the training room and the bedroom!) that makes Maya capable of defeating the bad guys and getting them both free.

By contrast, Dance with the Devil’s Dani is accustomed to fast, exciting, one-night-only sex. If it hurts, it doesn’t even matter because her TechCorps training has inured her against feeling pain. The only reason she hasn’t boned Rafe already is that their lives are so entangled that she fears what will happen in the fall-out if things don’t work out between them. It’s part and parcel of the years she’s spent thinking of her body as a weapon, finely honed to do as much damage as possible in the shortest amount of time. Rafe discovers that, despite and because of Dani’s history of speed and immunity to pain, she’s hungry for tenderness.

He licked the tips of her fingers, savoring the way she shuddered as he let his teeth scrape over her index finger. Soft touches, that was the key to Dani. Her body had built defenses against pain, but she melted under the gentlest graze of teeth or a fingernail tracing over skin.

During her time in Executive Security, Dani was required to put herself in the line of fire to protect her clients. Though she left that life behind long ago, she retains the instincts of protecting the people she’s responsible to and for, to the point of risking herself unnecessarily rather than accepting help. Her time with Rafe reminds her that the world offers different, lovelier, more expansive options than those TechCorps had in mind when they designed, altered, and abused her body. They can choose tenderness. They can choose hope.

In Rocha’s dystopian world, our characters’ bodies have been put to use by—in Nina’s case, specifically created for—the wealthy and powerful. This extreme of instrumentalization is the logical endgame of a system that puts the bodies of marginalized people in service to upholding inequality (unsafe labor conditions to maximize profits; deliberate, unregulated pollution of Black communities; restrictions on reproductive freedom; I could literally go on forever).

Rocha’s characters have spent much of their lives defined by TechCorps’s plans for them, yet they insist on carving out a liberated space within which they are free to use their bodies exactly as they want to: lots of violent revenge and lots of fun sex. Sex allows them to step outside of the purposes for which the bad guys designed, created, and modified them. Romance novels remind us that we don’t have to accept a grim vision of mind-body dualism where minds are for power and bodies for subjection. Bodies are not another person’s possessions; they are our selves.

Footnotes

1: If I dared send this column to my grandmother, whose copy of Alice in Wonderland I own, I like to think she’d be proud of me for coming up with those two Mock-Turtle-esque lists.

2: I once read an article headlined “The Best Sex I Ever Read Was Philip Roth’s Erotic Pee Scene,” and afterward I had to go lie down for twenty minutes and… do whatever the opposite of smoking a cigarette is. Drink a kale smoothie, or something. I still want to track down whoever wrote that article and gently and tenderly press a curated selection of romance novels into their hands. Like, baby. There’s better for you out there.

3: Of which there are, to be clear, many, and I think more and more as the years roll on! It’s just that the “many” are relative to the massively manier number of books that elide sex altogether, because they’re embarrassing and girly, or just include very gross and upsetting scenes like every single one Norman Mailer ever wrote. I am picking on him because he is dead now and also because when he was alive he stabbed his wife so I think I can lawfully mock him for writing with his very own hands the phrase “all five fingers fingering like a team of maggots at her open heat” in An American Dream, to say nothing of “I was ready to kill her as easy as not” in the following paragraph, lolsob, it is the heteropatriarchy that is the true prison.

4: Fat and disabled protagonists are notably underrepresented within traditional romance publishing (shouts to authors like Talia Hibbert, Olivia Dade, and Rebekah Weatherspoon for bucking this trend), while the indie space continues to offer a more expansive and inclusive range of stories.

5: Descartes has a lot to answer for.

I read the first book because I was super excited about the idea of mercenary librarians, taking dangerous jobs to help others and get the real treasure, knowledge. So I was really looking forward to this next book and seeing where it was all going in this dystopian world. I enjoyed that this book focused more on Maya and Grey this time. It was a great romance and cool to see how Maya was able to grow and become more active, especially when it came to recuing the children.

This was a good read and now I can't wait to read the third book and learn all about Dani and Rafe! And I really hope Maya, Dani and Nina and the Silver Devils can keep kicking butt and make their world a better place to live (and survive).

I was super excited to read this book! As a librarian myself, it was interesting to see a book about mercenary librarians fighting for what they believe is right! Its just the story to get you excited to come into work :)

I loved the first book and have been really excited for the second one. I hope that our patrons love these books as much as I do. 10/10

I am a member of the American Library Association Reading List Award Committee. This title was suggested for the 2022 list. It was not nominated for the award. The complete list of winners and shortlisted titles is at <a href="https://rusaupdate.org/2022/01/readers-advisory-announce-2022-reading-list-years-best-in-genre-fiction-for-adult-readers/">

There's nothing like post-apocalyptic librarians to get the heart pumping. The main character here is not specifically labeled as autistic, but she definitely read that way to me, and on Twitter, one of the authors stated that the character definitely had overlap with her own sensory issues.

This series is brilliant and I could not recommend it more highly.

Loovvee lovvee lovvee these books. I was so excited for this book (book 2 in the series) and I was not disappointed by any means!

The second in the Mercenary Librarian series. This time out Maya has a two million credit price for her capture dead it alive. The Tech Corps wants her at any cost. An assassin with great prowess and resolve is headed her way. Maya has uncovered a deal trading in cloned children. Gray the killer has a body that is failing and deep within him is a streak of the honest man he was. A true soldier he vows to finish the mission and save both the children and Maya.

Actual rating: 2.5

I didn't enjoy this as much as the first book, but it was interesting enough to keep me reading. The first book had both a solid plotline, and an interesting romance, mostly because the character were meeting and falling for each other for the first time, and partly because of all the betrayal aspect. Those elements were missing from this book for obvious reasons: the main characters already know each other and we do know that they have feelings for each other. So part of the reason why this wasn't like the first book is understandable. but I still think the author could do more with the romance. It was just just kinda there, a bit too bland for my taste.
That said, I'm very interested in seeing where the author goes with this series, so obviously I'll be reading the next book.

Maya has made a new life beyond the walls of Techcorp. With Nina and Dani she is leaving behind the Data Courier of a failed revolution and instead helping others build better lives, expect that she can't forget what happened at Techcorp. Grey is dying. The technology that made him an expert solider and assassin is failing and there is no way to fix it. With the team on the clock to save kids, Grey ends up partnering with Maya and the sparks between them start to build. But Grey has no future and Maya can't forget anything.

So this feels like a different book from the first one. [book:Deal with the Devil|45046593] starts off with action and keeps running at that fast pace. The Devil You Know is a much slower book. It starts with a bang but moves at a more gradual pace, mostly because it is Maya's speed. The build up between her and Grey is slow because Maya needs to trust which takes time.

The thing I struggled with the most was that this book drops you back in the plot. Its been a year since I read Deal with the Devil and I was "I don't know who this person is" over and over again. I do like that there are chapters from other POV's. I was also super ecstatic about the ghost appearance. Yay!

So I can't wait for the next book.

My thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for making an eArc of this book available to me.

Nice, solid second book in this post-apocalyptic series. Quite a bit more romance in the plotlines this time around (which works for me). We get more background on some of the characters, and the overall us-versus-BigBrother theme is advanced fairly well. Not quite as much action as the previous book in this one. The ending makes it pretty obvious that the author plans more books in this series, and I will look forward to reading them.

Set in a post apocalyptic Atlanta, The Devil You Know follows up Deal with the Devil. This time it's Maya's and Gray's story.

Maya was a data courier for powerful people - her brain held all the secrets they couldn't set to paper. After escaping, she's been carefully protecting her mind against overstimulation and the breakdown she's sure is coming. Gray is a supersoldier with a brain implant that's slowly failing, which will also kill him.

This book is surprisingly gentle. Though as I write it, I realize that's wrong. The romance is surprisingly gentle, set against a backdrop of danger, genetically engineered children, and torture. The book is not gentle. The romance is. Gray is so soft with Maya. And Maya is discovering (with Gray's help), that she can surpass the strict boundaries she's set for herself.

Super fun series. Spicy (but not as spicy as book one, and it makes sense for the character).

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

I think the thing I love (and often need) in this series is that it manages to be some of the most hopeful dystopian fiction I’ve ever read? Even in absolutely despairing situations, with circumstances that threaten to overwhelm this little motley crew of misfits, this found family is always going to look out for each other first in the midst of everything blowing up around them. It’s the kind of optimism that keeps me coming back for more as a reader and leaves me absolutely hungry for the next book. Maya and Gray’s relationship is markedly different from Nina and Knox’s, that simmering slow burn that ultimately crescendoes to something as soulful as it is HOT, and I’m already looking toward the potential sequel hair of Ava and Mace. Kit Rocha can never steer me wrong.

I voluntarily read and reviewed an advanced copy of this book from the publisher via NetGalley. All thoughts and opinions are my own.

3.5

The Librarians and the Silver Devils have settled into a content family-style dynamic. However, that doesn't negate the fact that there's still work to be done.

Maya still has a price on her head from when she escaped from TechCorps with all their secrets and the keys to a revolution. Despite this, when the group discovers a group of genetically enhanced children is being sold to the highest bidder, they'll stop at nothing to thwart whoever is behind the scheme. But this also has the potential to bring attention to Maya.

Gray is determined to keep Maya safe no matter the cost. And with his implant modifications acting up, he knows that cost might be pretty high, as in, his life. But where Maya is concerned he'd gladly sacrifice himself, little does he know Maya feels the same way about Gray. Both of them will fight to the end to keep what they've found with one another.

Compared to the first book, I felt like this book was a little bit slower to progress. I think it's because that ever-present tension between the separate groups has settled now that they've formed one trusted group working together. Instead, this time around I feel like we almost get the opposite pacing of the first book with a lot of quieter, contemplative moments with a few action sequences peppered throughout. Make no mistake, however, the story does slowly build to a rather impressively explosive ending.

In that way, we got to see more of the kind of everyday operations that the Librarians are involved in - their interactions with their "patrons" as the case may be. I kind of liked seeing the day-to-day, but also make no mistake this is definitely still a dystopian future with a maniacal megacorporation lording over the regular people. In fact, I'm kind of hoping the next book in the series gives us some more focus on what happens up in The Hill - where TechCorp houses its "lair".

One of the bid standouts for me was just the character dynamics. I loved seeing the group interactions, loved seeing how they've created this family. I think that Kit Rocha has really nailed the way that they format their books in that this is definitely Maya and Gray's story, but they're so good about giving readers points of view from each other main character that you never feel like you've lost out on the previous characters like often happens in a series that features a different couple with each book. Nina and Knox are still so present, and Rafe and Dani are hard to ignore. Their build-up has been done especially well and really makes me excited for their book.

Overall, while the story itself took a bit for me to get into this time around, it built up slowly enough that by the finish I was definitely not ready for things to end. I'm hoping this series will go further than just a trilogy. There's certainly some very interesting setups happening. I'd say if you enjoyed the first book, you'll like this one as well.

Definitely don’t start this series here: if you haven’t read it already, go back and read Deal With The Devil first, because if you try to dive in here you’re going to be pretty confused about who’s who and what’s going on. There’s a good-sized core cast and the authors don’t really re-introduce them, instead diving pretty much straight into the action.

This book focuses on Maya, the savant trained to be a walking memory bank, and Grey, the sniper. We got to learn some more about Maya’s background, but I did finish the book thinking that Grey was still something of a cipher; he was still just a ‘team player’ and I wanted more of him as an individual.

The world-building in this series is truly excellent, and while it’s a dystopian future, what I’m enjoying about the series is that each book builds more hope that things are going to change. The crew get to take down a Big Bad here, though a post-epilogue stinger hints that the Big Bad may have actually been replaced by something worse, which will be fascinating in the next book - presumably Rafe and Dani’s story.

I do feel like this one focussed a bit too much on the action and not quite enough on the romance. I do love the whole world and the overarching plot as the crew try to take down TechCorp, but I wanted more of those squishy feelings, especially Grey’s. I’m still thoroughly invested in the plot and I’m keen to keep reading - I think we might have got some hints that Ava will be getting a story after Dani’s, which would be awesome, because Ava is absolutely my favourite character in this series so far. I’ll give this four stars.

This falls into what I call the second book chasm. It fills a need to get everyone on the same page. It sets up the next book. It gets two characters together. It just does not make that good a read. I kept waiting for the plot to reveal itself as I read the first half. The second half did get two characters together. There was danger and tension with the romance. It just took getting to the ending to set up the next book. I loved book one. Was somewhat interested in book two and have hopes that book three is a have trouble putting it down like book one. Not a stand alone.

I used to devour romantic suspense but haven’t really read much in the sub genre in recent years. However, the second instalment of the Mercenary Librarians series, The Devil You Know by Kit Rocha brings back all the love I had for this genre!

If you love badass characters and competence porn, this book is for you! Maya, our heroine, doesn’t have the superpowered physicality of the other Librarians, but her perfect recall means that’s she retains everything she’s ever seen and heard. This is useful in a dangerous post-apocalyptic world where Maya’s life is in danger day to day, but comes with a risk of sensory overload. However, she learns to live life and since meeting Gray, our stoic with everyone but her sniper hero, Maya becomes more open to testing her limitations.

But time is running out for Gray as his body is rejecting his cybernetic implant and the MCs cling to spend the remaining time together. All the while, they are racing to save trafficked children from an evil corporation.

Needless to say, this book is ACTION PACKED! I really enjoyed Maya’s self-discovery and Gray’s unflinching care for her despite his own mortality was so beautiful. Their interactions the whole book made me smile as it was so adorable to see this badass assassin practically swoon every time Maya smiled at him.

The whole case of secondary characters were also amazing and I’m champing on the bit to get an Ava (the most murderous of them all) book!

#kiterocha #mercenarylibrarians #thedevilyouknow #romanticsuspense #bookmages

I really liked the first book in this series, Deal with the Devil, and was excited to get into this one. The action is there from the get go, and I appreciated being re-introduced to all the characters and the dystopic world. After the action and set up of the conflict, however, the narrative stalls.

It's not completely without purpose - new characters are introduced, main characters are developed. We see more of the neighborhood and get a sense of the Mercenary Librarians' and Silver Devils' mission. All good... but it was a lot, and the vague sense of purpose doesn't propel the narrative. I would drag myself back to the page to chip away at it, and when we get to 75% finally, finally, the plot proper kicks in.

And wow, Rocha can write a fight scene. These characters have amazing abilities, some learned over the course of the novel, and it's exciting and satisfying to see them put to use. Not too little, but it did feel too late for the story to get moving.

The lack of plot doesn't take away from the characters, though. I don't know why I didn't realize it earlier, but nearly all of the main characters are neurodiverse due to the implants and "enhancements" they've been saddled with. There are people with touch aversion, ADHD-esque thought processes, chronic pain, desensitization to pain, and more. Many have experienced abuse, some even torture, in their past. One torture scene is in the present. Rocha creates a loving, found family environment for all of them while also building a larger community.

The great and the meh ended up leveling out to good for me. I'm still looking forward to reading more about these characters, and hope that the plot of the third book is more like the first.

Content notes: torture, death, mentions of past abuse, violence, PTSD-esque flashbacks. Full content notes available on the author's website.