Dance with the Devil is one of the most satisfying conclusions to a series I've ever read. The main characters were everything I was hoping for, and their relationship developed so incredibly believably.

All the tangling threads came together in this conclusion to give us a nice stopping point.

Of course I want more, and I hope one day to get it, but for now - I'm happy.

I love these authors. They are amazing. I don't think I've read everything they're written, but I've read a lot of it, and this was a very satisfying tale. It's got a lot of action, and a lot of romance, which is exactly what I was hoping for with this book.

Dance with the Devil concludes the Mercenary Librarians trilogy with the story of Dani and Rafe. With the rise of a new VP of Security, the opportunity to take down TechCorps is looming. The opposition lead by Nina, Maya, and Dani has grown and they have help on the Hill. Now they just need to choose their time and make a controlled strike to take out the corrupt head without destroying the whole organization. Plenty of character development, fight scenes, romance, and intrigue can be found in this enjoyable title that brings closure to this story arc. But there is hints of more to come in this universe in the last few chapters that hint at new characters coming! Fun times!

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.

The epic, heartwrenching, sexy conclusion to this series that I was both looking forward to and absolutely dreading. (Say there will be more to come, please!) Loved the little Easter egg nod to the O'Kanes, and Dani and Rafe were the perfect couple to end on. Also appreciated how much this book continued to ratchet up the tension between them before they gave way to the bigger, scarier Feelings (and of course, they did it in the way only Dani and Rafe could). Plus those lovely found family vibes that only Kit Rocha can deliver!

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

Okay, hear me out: mercenary librarians. You sold yet? Because that's all, it took to sell me on this series (no, seriously – it's true). Dance with the Devil is the third novel in Kit Rocha's Mercenary Librarians series, and it has been such a delight to read.

Dani and her family have been fighting long and hard to make the world around them a better place. They collect books and resources, creating safe spaces. They also don't think twice about taking out the dangerous people around them.

In truth, they have been hunting the villains of TechCorps for years now, and it is all about to come to a head. Finally, Dani will come face to face with the person who made her the way she is, but will she survive?

Yikes! I can't believe this is the ending to the Mercenary Librarians series. Not to say that I didn't see it coming. I hate goodbyes, you know? Moving on - Dance with the Devil is the book we've all been waiting for.

As with the others of this series, Dance with the Devil is split into two main perspectives. Dani is the first (and I would say primary, but that might be my bias showing). Naturally, that means Rafe is the other perspective in this novel, adding fuel to the budding romance between the two.

Dani and Rafe have been doing a bit of a dance for the last two novels, so it seems appropriate that their novel be named Dance with the Devil. Gotta appreciate that little detail, even if the title also applies to the main plot arc.

Speaking of, the action and main antagonist were perfect. This novel worked hard (REAL hard) to wrap up the loose threads established over three books. That means that everything about TechCorps had to be dealt with, plus many subplots that have begun along the way.

I appreciated the cleaning up of all these loose ends. It made for the perfect if bittersweet, conclusion to the Mercenary Librarians. Dani/Rafe kicking butts, taking names, and falling for each other was the icing on the cake.

Kit Rocha continues the Mercenary Librarians in the dystopic American novel Dance with the Devil. All the characters have grey or black pasts as those seeking a better life for the general population fight corporate America with its corporate mercenaries. This novel ends with a mixed future for the country.

Finally! It seems like Dani and Rafe have been dancing around their feelings for each other for WAY too long. Their undercover assignment made their attraction to each other even harder to ignore.

Infiltrating TechCorp was a risky proposition, but when Dani is confronted with her past and Rafe finds someone he never expected to, things become even more dangerous.

As with the other books in this series, there wasn’t much down time and their seemed to be unexpected danger around every corner. Add to that the emotional roller coaster that both Rafe and Dani put readers through and it’s no surprise that Dance with the Devil was a hard one to put down. Both of these characters took turns breaking my heart for them. A lot was discovered about both of them and a past that defined them in very different ways. They both did things they weren’t proud of – even though they were in survival mode at the time.

It seems like each installment of the Mercenary Librarians series gets more intense and the stakes keep getting higher. Mainly because there are more people to care about and more people to protect. The twists and turns that took place during the course of Dance with the Devil didn’t stop with the final chapter. There’s definitely more to come and I can’t wait to see what this writing duo has in store for the characters next. 😉

The entire Mercenary Librarians series has been a delightful romp from start to finish, but this one may end up being my fave just for the “avengers, assemble” vibes — all the contacts they’ve made and people they’ve helped come together to fight a battle against the big bad. It did feel like it was over a little too quickly, but maybe that’s just because I was zooming through the book. Rafe is dreamy, of course, and I relished the opportunity to finally get inside Dani’s head and see what makes her tick after reading about her for two other books. And I looooved the ending! Thanks to Tor Books for sending me a copy!

My lovely, murderous little dystopian badasses!!! I adore Kit Rocha’s writing and The Mercenary Librarians series in general so I was over the moon excited when I found out this third book was finally about Dani and Rafe.

These two have sexual tension that is off the charts and Kit Rocha did an amazing job letting that tension simmer until it boiled over into the best, most explosive love story. It was worth the wait, that’s for sure!

I hope we get more books in this world because I need more but this was a very satisfying ending if this really is the final book! I loved seeing everyone working together, not only our leading ladies and their men but everyone in the community coming together to defeat their common foe.

This was action packed, hilarious and full of the best banter, plus fantastic smut wrapped up into a love story that will leave you ready to turn back to page one so you can experience it all over again.

I genuinely can’t recommend this series more!! So, so good.

4/5⭐️

The world-building in this series has been excellent throughout, but it has grown increasingly complex with each subsequent book. I was worried I wouldn't be able to keep up with all the characters and their intrigues and machinations to take down the corporations/directors who had destroyed their lives and murdered their friends and siblings. Not to worry-Kit Rocha has us covered. The multiple POVs, especially at the beginning of the book, work to get the reader caught up and back into the internal and external dynamics of the team so that when the focus shifts to Dani and Rafe, we are ready for their story and undercover operation to take center stage.

It's a pleasure to read such an intricately crafted story that works on the level of a post-apocalyptic thriller, with multiple romances, a team heist, and sci-fi elements woven throughout. It's a stunning conclusion to an excellent series!
Five stars!
Thank you to NetGalley and Tor for an eARC!

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/4941684169

Book 3 of the Mercenary Librarians gives readers Dani and Rafe's story. The tension has been mounting between them and the chemistry is strong. All their friends and family know it even as the two of them resist and continue to play the dance. Now they are tasked with going undercover as a couple on the Hill. Both of them are willing to sacrifice to keep the other safe and things will definitely get tense and dangerous with unexpected surprises before the world comes into alignment.
The entire cast of characters from this series makes their appearance as well loved sometimes abrasive family members. Rafe who has sacrificed so much for his family comes face to face with his sister in the most unexpected place. As always allies exist in the most unexpected places and a common need and common good unites people in ways that fear and oppression never does.
This might be my most favorite book of the series and I can't wait to see it continue.

If there’s one thing readers can learn from Kit Rocha’s dystopian world, it’s that we’ve got roughly sixty years to get a grip on society before it all goes FUBAR. Because in the post-apocalyptic world that went dark after the Flares (the solar storms that damaged global power grids), darkness isn’t the worst thing that can happen to us – in their world, it’s TechCorps. Dance with the Devil is the third installment Rocha’s fun, fast-paced Mercenary Librarians series, and it’s as deliciously dangerous as the first two.

These mercenary librarians are every young introvert’s dream because it’s the librarians who save the world. Yes, they work with and fall in love with the genetically altered, elite super soldiers known as the Silver Devil Squad, but Rocha creates a world where the brain is as important as the brawn in taking down the goliath corporate overlords. Here, the Silver Devils aren’t the only brawn.

Dani is one of the three information broker librarians whose knowledge is almost as powerful as her body mods. She’s a dangerous assassin who can’t feel pain, which is good when she’s in the middle of kicking ass, but can be a detriment when all is said and done, because injuries still have to heal. Her self-appointed guardian Devil is Rafe, who, like the other Silver Devils, was once a member of the Protectorate (the soldiers who protected the TechCorps elite). Dani and Rafe should be natural enemies, but the two groups have been working together since the first book to tear apart and rebuild the futuristic system, so they’re copasetic.

Their chemistry is off the charts hot, but their attraction is distracting. Everyone knows they’re meant for one another, but both Dani and Rafe insist their key responsibilities are moving the revolution forward (not finding love). Rafe loves Dani to distraction, and he’s smart enough to not push for anything she’s not ready to give. At this point in the series, the TechCorps president is dead and there’s a power vacuum in the top tier of the ruling society. The Silver Devils and the Librarians intend to fill it, and when an insider presents an opportunity to infiltrate the Hill, Dani and Rafe go undercover as a couple.

Their attraction is mutual, so there’s no pointless ‘will-they-won’t-they’ emotional waffling. It’s the timing and importance of the mission that throws up roadblocks, and that creates an entirely different type of tension because knowing the person you’re interested in shares the attraction means you’re not clamoring for affection. Theirs is a very mature, responsible affair, and it’s been an exercise in patience three books in the making to see their happy ending come to fruition.

I like that the brain and the brawn isn’t exclusive to gender, and both Dani and Rafe are equally intelligent and physically formidable. The apocalypse evens the playing field, y’all, and that’s probably the biggest plus in the collective dystopian world building. I love this series.

Buy it at: Amazon, Audible or your local independent retailer
Visit our Amazon Storefront

This review was originally posted on <a href="https://booksofmyheart.net/2022/08/16/dance-with-the-devil-by-kit-rocha/" target="_blank"> Books of My Heart</a>
&nbsp;

<i>Review copy was received from NetGalley. This does not affect my opinion of the book or the content of my review.</i>

I was thrilled to contine the <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/series/260403-mercenary-librarians" target="_blank" rel="noopener noreferrer"><em><strong>Mercenary Librarians</strong> </em></a>series.  Each book has a new couple for romantic suspense and more of the overall story arc for the series.  Basically, the greedy TechnoCorp uses people, including abducting and cloning children, with only the rich few running everything and living comfortably.   I would really read these books in order.

Now we have Rafe and Dani in <strong>Dance with the Devil</strong>.  This is book 3 and these 2 have been dancing around each other for awhile.  They both have some issues and abuse in their past which is the norm in this series.  It is hard to read the books a year apart and impractical to always reread earlier books before the new one.  I was very excited for this couple.

Our group has been hiding in Atlanta, building a community with things like a library, a garden, a school, and a medical clinic. They have made great progress but it's a worry if they are found with the superior forces of TechnoCorp.  I love the way they are building these supports for their lives and making new found family, as well as reclaiming family members from the clutches of TechnoCorp.  I was happy to know more of Rafe and Dani's backstory, and meet Rafe's mother and siblings.

We also get progress on the standoff with TecnhoCorps.   Rafe and Dani go to "the Hill"  to try to gather intelligence so they can stop TechnoCorps.  They make some good contacts, which allow them to stage a coup, putting some of the more reasonable people in charge of TechnoCorps.  But the evil, greedy ones still want to enslave our talented group again, so I have great concerns for their future.

This was probably my favorite Kat Rocha book! The spicy scenes were absolutely perfect, and the romance between the two protagonists was equally perfect. They both want to be together but will not for their own reasons; I thought Kit Rocha did an amazing job of bringing out the best in both characters and showing them at their worst emotions and making them believable.

Thank you to NetGalley, Tor Books and the authors for the opportunity to read an ARC of this title. An honest review was requested but not required.

I've been looking forward to this one. Book #3 of the Mercenary Librarian series, starring Dani and Rafe, which has been building up since the start. Frankly, any time these two were on-page in book #2 it was a total scene stealer. I loved to see them working together here. It was cool that Dani wasn't the absolute apex badass she thought she was. I love when characters meet limits and find ways to succeed anyways (rather than the all-too-common "leveling up"). I felt like Dani reminded me somehow a lot of Ava, just not as mean or cold. And of course Rafe was just charming and 110% gone for Dani since Day One.

Don't get me wrong, there was plenty of plot advancement here too, not just romance. Things come to a head with Tech Corps (sort of) and our main characters are all left off tied up in neat bows serving the community and building a better world. There's a lot left to do, though, and qite a few more characters' stories to be told - Ava, Beth, Phoenix, and Tessa are just a few - so I really hope the authors have a few more Mercenary Librarians stories in them.

The librarians are back fighting TechCorps. After an undercover mission goes a little south, the team seeks a final mission. ARC from NetGalley.

I quite like the Mercenary Librarians series, but for some reason this latest one did not pull me in nearly as quickly as the first two. There isn't really much in the way of actual plot development until we're 30% through, and while I am in no way opposed to romance and character thoughts and all that...I just wanted something to happen first. Once we got through the first rounds of 'woe is us' from Dani and Rafe, it got better. There was still plenty of relationship development but there was also PLOT development happening at the same time. I'm very curious where #4 is going, because the teaser end chapter has all sorts of possibilities!

I loved both of the previous installments in the Mercenary Librarians series - they are such a great blend of dystopia, romance, action, small-town living (even though the series takes place in Atlanta, because it’s broken into neighborhoods, it feels like a small town).

So did this third book live up to the others? Why yes, yes it did!! It’s awesome!!

This entry had a lot more recapping of prior events than the second book did, so you could get away with not doing a reread of the series. Although I don’t know why you would want to deny yourself the fun of a reread, but you do you 😉

The main couple in this one is Rafe & Dani, and I love them soooo much! Whether it’s the banter, the smoldering looks, the fighting…it all works. And this particular book accomplished something that I didn’t think would ever happen. Men giving women cutesy nicknames and endearments normally bugs me, because I think most of them just sound stupid. But every time Rafe called Dani “cupcake” I swooned ❤️

Oh, and surprise surprise, this is not the last book in the series like I thought it was. There’s at least one more coming, so happy reading everybody!

Thank you to NetGalley & Macmillan-Tor/Forge for this advanced reader copy. All opinions expressed in this review are my own.

I received an ARC from the publisher and am voluntarily posting a review. All opinions are my own.
Dance with the Devil is the third in Kit Rocha’s Mercenary Librarians, and perhaps the strongest in the series. And given how Dani and Rafe have stolen the show in prior books, it’s easy to see why.
The lingering sexual tension between the two has been obvious since their initial interactions, but I loved exploring more about them this time around. Rafe and Dani’s mutual pining is beautiful, if a bit complex and tainted, given the extremes both have had to go through to survive in their dystopian environment. There’s a sense of beauty in seeing them grapple with their reality and come to find some sort of solace in each other.
There are once again a handful of chapters with perspectives from the rest of the crew, and I felt the balance here was much better executed. It’s great to see what the previous central couples are up to, and while future books have yet to be confirmed, to get a sense of whose story and what may be next.
The politics of the book are also very well-established, and while the authors have never been shy about their beliefs (both in-text or on social media), there’s something cathartic about the way they’re expressed in the expression of the world here. The real world has definitely provided a lot of inspiration for the political and technological corruption that takes place in the book. I love how it goes out of its way to redefine Southern identity, especially for those who don’t identify with the “cozy” lily-white small town narratives that have turned the South into a stereotype, and instead focus on the way marginalized people are silenced by those in power.
This is the strongest of the series to date, and more than makes up for any issues I had with the prior books by living up to what has been promised. However you felt about the prior books, this one is definitely worth the read.