We each spend these quarantimes dowsing for happiness, waving our rods hither and yon in the ever-more-vain hope that happiness will appear just beneath the surface. There is a happiness drought, and we are denounced as frauds for believing we can find it. But there is hope! Kit Rocha’s Deal with the Devil is here, and it has all the happiness (and waving rods1) you could desire!
In the aftermath of enormous solar flares and governmental collapse, Nina and her team of mercenary librarians have carved out a home for themselves. They share knowledge and stories with their community and try to make people’s lives better. Meanwhile, Knox and his team of supersoldiers have defected from their handlers because it’s the Right Thing to Do, but bad guys have seized their biochem hacker, the only person capable of keeping their brain implants from degrading and killing them all by inches. The bad guys will give them back the hacker — in exchange for Nina. So Knox and his guys propose a team-up to do a theft, knowing all the while that they plan to give up Nina’s team to the forces of evil. BUT A GRUDGING RESPECT FORMS AND OH NO WHAT WILL THEY DO NOW. Also, Nina and Knox most definitely want to bone.
Kit Rocha have been writing dystopian SF romance for many many years, and they are reliable as fuck when it comes to setting up found families you adore and ratcheting up the stakes of their dystopian world until you can’t see a way that anyone gets out of this alive. But then they get out of there alive! Because it’s a romance novel!
God, can I just say that I love romance novels a lot? I was fraught with suspense throughout Deal with the Devil, and yet! Because I knew it was a romance novel, I knew everything was going to work out for a best. The time arrived when Nina et al. discovers that Knox et al. were playing them all along, and of course it happens at the worst possible time, i.e., when they are at the mercy of the bad guys, and in a regular SFF book I would have gotten nervous and read the end, but because it’s a romance novel, I already knew the end, and the end would inevitably be that Knox and Nina were happily in a relationship. Which is what happened. And I do not have to mark that as a spoiler, because Deal with the Devil is a romance novel and is therefore defined by its genre as a book in which, at the end, Knox and Nina are happily in a relationship.
In the meantime, there’s so? much? friendship??
“I’m not about to arm wrestle someone if I can just shoot them in the head instead.”
“Uh-huh.” Dani propped her chin on one hand. “So what do you do when you can’t?”
Maya made a face at her. “Rest easy in heaven knowing you’re gonna avenge me?”
“Not if you give up without a fucking fight.” Dani snorted. “Haunt me forever, see if I care. I’m not embarking on a dark path of vengeance and death because you skipped cardio.”
FRIENDSHIP. Which honestly is another great thing about romance novels: Very often, they come in a series! Then if you were like “wow I loved how Nina held the team together but Dani does so many murders, I want her to find love but I also want to see more of their close and enduring friendship,” all you have to do is wait for a while and the authors of the romance novel, who are geniuses, will assuredly write a story in which Dani finds love but is still part of a close and enduring friendship with all the characters from the first book. (I don’t know how this post became a commercial for romance novels, but I’m comfortable with it.)
Now for some spoilers about the bad guys. Do not read this paragraph if you don’t want to know these spoilers. I have very politely not put the spoilers in caps, even though caps were the way I truly felt about them. When it gets down to time to find out who the bad guys are, [here is where I would start doing all caps in normal life] the person who hired Knox to lure in Nina is her alive-after-all evil twin. [Here is where I would do all caps in a bigger font.] Evil twin!!!!! But then her evil twin is not evil after all, and when it’s time for the evil twin to find love, there will certainly be a very great deal of complicated sister emotions. If there is one thing I love nearly as much as an actually evil twin, it’s a complicated sister relationship!
All in all, I encourage you all to read this book so that Tor will cause Kit Rocha to write the rest of the series. So many murdergirls!!
Note: I received an e-ARC of Deal with the Devil from the publisher for review consideration.
- I DON’T KNOW WHY I’M LIKE THIS except I do know why I’m like this and it’s that I have completely stopped writing book reviews sober and now refuse to write them unless I’ve had two glasses of wine. ↩