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.

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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.

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