The mercenary librarians are back in The Devil You Know, and they’re just as librarian as before! If possible even more librarian, insofar as there are multiple scenes of scanning books so the books will be shareable to a wider group of people.
Y’all may remember me screeching and carrying on about the first book in this series, Deal with the Devil, and how gosh-darn fun it was despite being about a dystopian future in which a few scrappy and independent-minded escapees of government torture banded together to carve out a small space for happiness and community. Well, this is the sequel, and I stand by everything I said about Deal with the Devil and it’s true in The Devil You Know as well. This is Maya and Gray’s book. Maya is the former information courier for sinister corporation TechCorps, who was given the dubious gift of an eidetic memory and a whole host of corporate secrets. Gray is the sniper from among Rafe’s unmerry band of supersoldiers, and he is very stone-faced, and the implant that makes him a supersoldier has begun to deteriorate and will soon kill him. Plus, someone’s trafficking in cloned children, and everybody is determined to put a stop to that. Fun times all around!
When I said “fun times all around!” before, I was being flippant, and in fact flippanter than I would have been being1 if I’d used the same phrasing about Deal with the Devil. Deal with the Devil is more of a caper, setting up the world and the characters in a road-trippy setting that’s hard not to find fun.2 The Devil You Know, by contrast, addresses the aftermath of trauma and the effort it takes to find value in a self that has been so significantly fractured by the selfishness and greed of the people who hurt you.
In a world controlled by variously malicious corporations and governments, just about everyone we meet is recovering from trauma of some kind. Maya and Gray share the experience of having been molded into the perfect tools for their evil overlords, then pressed into service of a cause they didn’t believe in, for which the skill sets they were forced to possess have made them particularly suited. Though their suitability as weapons was purpose-built by bad guys, Maya and Gray still have to grapple with the ways they’ve been wielded to do harm in the past. Gray views his own impending death as a kind of amends, while Maya lives with the fear that she’ll be taken and used again in the same way she was before.
Because this is a Kit Rocha book, both those impulses translate as action taken to protect those around them who are more vulnerable. Most obviously, the trafficked, cloned children. Maya and her friends take a personal interest, given that Nina herself is the product of a prior child cloning experiment. Remembering their many losses of agency, Maya and her friends are determined to put an end to the traffic in children — of course — but also to find a safe and comfortable life for the child survivors they rescue. Rocha makes a point of the children’s agency: at one point, the little girl Rainbow is offered a new home, but she chooses to stay in the librarians’ enclave, and that choice is respected. Love to see it! Children are people too!
On the other side of the innocence/experience spectrum is the newly returned, somewhat brainwashed supersoldier Rafe’s team thought was dead. Once their medic and sworn brother, Mace now tries to kill people sometimes. Not all the time, though! Gray and Rafe and the rest of them are pretty confident they can keep Mace and his potential murder targets (who are mostly them, anyway!) safe until he’s all the way unbrainwashed; this is not an opinion warmly shared by Nina’s feral murder twin, Ava. She keeps coming around with extravagant gifts delivered with a scowl and threats to Rafe’s crew delivered with — okay, not with a smile, but certainly you imagine with a lot of teeth.
Unusually for a Kit Rocha book, The Devil You Know is low on sex, given Maya’s and Rafe’s mutual extreme cautiousness, Rafe’s impending very much death,3 and Maya’s sensory issues. (Sensory issues: You know more people who have them than you might realize!) It’s another reminder that sex scenes are a tool for telling story and building character and can be deployed, or withheld, very effectively in those two capacities. When Maya and Rafe finally do have sex, it’s not just hooray-boning, although Hooray boning!, it’s also a sign to the reader of how much their relationship has grown and how much Maya has learned to trust Rafe and even more so to trust herself with understanding and enforcing her own limits. The third book is about Dani and will undoubtedly be just wall-to-wall boning. Sex as character development! Who knew!
(The romance genre knew. For quite a while now.)
All in all, a fast-paced, emotional, deeply satisfying second outing for the series. I am already making yearning-cat noises about Dani’s book, which is probably either called Devil in the Details or Dance with the Devil, and I am choosing to live in the uncertainty of not knowing which.
(Oh shit, or Devil May Care. Or also Devil’s Advocate. Or Speak of the Devil. Help, I can’t stop thinking of titles! Kit Rocha will just have to keep writing romances in this series until they run out of idioms!)
Note: I received an egalley of The Devil You Know, whose title I forgot as I was writing this sentence because I have thought of too many devil idioms and it’s rotted my brain, for review consideration from Netgalley.
- WordPress at this point is like “for fuck’s sake, does readability score mean nothing to you? ↩
- Whiskey Jenny at this point begs to differ and could not get past the various tortures and persons in jeopardy, which I admit are very much present in the first book too. ↩
- Come on. It’s a romance novel. We all know he’s going to be okay. ↩