Deal with the Devil
The Mercenary Librarians series, Book 1
Kit Rocha
Tor
Fiction, Action/Romance/Sci-Fi
*** (Okay)
DESCRIPTION: After the solar flares that devastated global civilization, nations crumbled into hardscrabble remnants of themselves. Too many city and state governments found themselves at the mercy of the TechCorps, elite private organizations who rule with iron fists and artificially enhanced soldiers. For the average citizen, life is cruel and hard and continues only at the whim of forces beyond their control... but some few manage to slip the leashes of their masters and go underground, quietly working against the TechCorps and the criminal networks that spread to fill the power vacuum across America.
Nina was once one of three clone siblings, trained as a unit for special ops, until one disastrous mission left her the last one standing. Faking her death, she fled to a nondescript neighborhood in Atlanta, where she and two friends work to create something like stability and hope and community. Together, they help the people by distributing books and media beyond the strictly controlled (and profit-driven) official TechCorps outlets, providing shelter and medicine, even helping locals preserve food from their meager farms and gardens (most of which are illegal for not using patented TechCorps crops and seeds). When Nina gets word that a stash from the Rogue Library of Congress - a group of renegade librarians who, during the collapse of the old world, defied orders and compiled everything they could in hidden and sealed vaults for future generations - she knows it could mark a real turning point, the chance to bring so much lost knowledge back to the people and maybe break the chains binding the world. She also knows that it may well be too good to be true, but she cannot resist the hope... or the handsome messenger.
Knox was captain of the Silver Devils, a unit of artificially enhanced Protectorate soldiers crafted and mercilessly trained to enforce TechCorps rule, until his masters pushed too hard and stole too much. Now he and his men are on the run - but they can't run forever. They'll die in a matter of weeks if they can't figure out how to disable the killswitch in their enhancements, a built-in failsafe against disobedience. His team found a promising lead in a rogue specialist, but she was kidnapped, and the abductors demand a ransom: the capture and return of Nina. What at first seemed like a simple, if cold-blooded, equation - a stranger exchanged for a friend and the future of his men - soon becomes far too complicated. Knox has never met anyone like Nina before, never felt anything like she makes him feel. Can he really betray this woman and her friends? Does he even have a choice?
REVIEW: This book makes its promises pretty early on and up front, offering a dystopian post-apocalyptic world as backdrop for a decently steamy romance, with a healthy dose of action and angst and banter among side characters. Nina, Knox, and most of the characters in the book have suitably traumatic backstories that render them physically superior but emotionally ill-equipped to deal with the prospect of True Love, thrust into a plot that ensures betrayal and heartbreak and second-guessing of one's own heart (and a few opportunities for sex even while they wrestle with their inner angst over whether they're even capable of love). They have distinctive personalities and mesh well together, even when they have personality clashes. It also contains a decent level of actual action, not just the promise of action; these are all mercenaries in a post-apocalyptic world, and their travels are suitably and inherently dangerous. (Some stories set up "dangerous" worlds and neglect the actual dangerous part.) So, on those levels, the story more or less works.
The "less" parts, unfortunately, really started to bug me.
More than once, the characters - all ostensibly tactically trained - stumble into traps so obvious they might as well have been red X's under cartoon boxes propped on sticks. (Seriously, when I - someone about as tactically aware as a clod of dirt - spot a trap before the military "expert" characters, something's wrong.) There were also far, far too many times where someone was on the verge of saying something exceptionally important, only for another character to barge in right as they were opening their mouth and stop the conversation before it starts. A few times, yes, understandable, but it just kept happening. I especially got irked how the same characters would've had ample time to talk if they hadn't wasted so much time before opening their mouth wrestling with the same angst-riddled Issues they'd already wrestled with before. Another trick that started out interesting but soon felt like so much wasted time was the author's insistence on interlude notes and memos from the outfits that created Nina, Knox, and the other characters, which didn't ultimately add much that the story itself didn't tell me and just became clutter. Add in a few twists that felt rather cliche and stale and an ending that, given the high level of action and violence preceding it, felt weirdly flat and rushed (followed by an eyeroll-worthy "twist" setting up a conflict for the next installment), and I wound up feeling distinctly unengaged.
There are many parts here that work well, and should've elevated it to a Good rating, but it just starts feeling too stretched and over the top.
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