Dance with the Devil

Mercenary Librarians Series, Book 3

By: Kit Rocha

Narrated by: Lidia Dornet

Power is never given, only taken

Tobias Richter, the fearsome VP of Security of the TechCorps is dead. The puppet master is gone and the organization is scrambling to maintain control by ruthlessly limiting Atlanta's access to resources, hoping to quell rebellion. Our band of mercenary librarians have decided that the time for revolution has come.

Maya uses her wealth of secrets to weaken the TechCorps from within. Dani strikes from the shadows, picking off the chain of command one ambush at a time. And Nina is organizing their community—not just to survive, but to fight back. When Maya needs to make contact with a sympathetic insider, Dani and Rafe are the only ones with the skill-set and experience to infiltrate the highest levels of the TechCorps. They'll go deep undercover in the decadent, luxury-soaked penthouses on the Hill.

Bringing Dani face-to-face with the man who turned her into a killer. And forcing Rafe to decide how far he'll go to protect both of his families-the one he was born to, and the one he made for himself.

Victory will break the back of Power. Failure will destroy Atlanta.

©2022 Kit Rocha (P)2022 Tantor

Can’t wait

I want more. This is a story I can hardly wait for the next book

Need more books from this series!

So we do end on a cliffhanger of sorts. But it’s kind of a confusing one because I’m just going “I don’t know who this is” at the end. I will say the plot with the TechCorps as we know it is generally resolved in a satisfactory way, but there’s the aftermath of all that still to be worked out. And we have some HEAs for characters that still need to happen! We did get some new characters in this series with this book, so how many more books do the authors have planned? I did enjoy Dani and Rafe’s relationship here, but I liked that there was more at stake and quite a few more action scenes playing out in this book than the last one.

Content notes includes violence, limb loss, deaths (include mass deaths), and bombings.

Dani and Rafe has had sexual tension brewing between them since the first book. While Dani is only in relationships for a good time and not looking for anything serious, Rafe WANTS a serious relationship. They’re both supersoldiers created by the TechCorps to be used as weapons, but they’re also more than that. I appreciated learning about their backstories and seeing Dani finding family with the people around her who accept her so readily, no questions asked. And I’m glad we get to meet the family Rafe mentioned in a previous book. We ended the last book with a cliffhanger as Tobias Richter's data courier, Cara Kennedy, shows up at the home of Rafe's family and wants to offer his younger sister, Tessa, an opportunity. And you just know that was going nowhere good.

We, however, do not see Tessa for awhile. It's like how we knew about Mace at the end of the first book but it took what seemed like forever for him to be introduced to the story in book two? That's what happens here with Tessa as well.

I really liked how this book was more action-packed, and there’s even undercover work going on. Although I’m still kind of confused WHY they needed to go undercover? Was it just to make contact with that one person? I don’t know, it felt kind of like a too elaborate scheme for what they needed to accomplish, but it did give a chance to bring Dani and Rafe together and I feel like that was more the goal here than anything else.

One downside to reading all these books back-to-back is that I feel like I would’ve liked this more if I had some more distance from the Beyond series books? What happens to one community here that brings people together to finally fight back against those on the Hill, is maybe too reminiscent of what happens to Sector Two in the Beyond series. So to me, it just felt like a reusing of plot points, and the thing is I felt like the Beyond series handled everything better. So it was weird to see a condensed version of practically the same events play out in this book.

And speaking of Sector Two, did no one catch that lady offering a card with an orchid on it to Dani and Rafe?? Is that Cerys??? I honestly forgot we never got an ending for her in the Beyond series and I just assumed she died, not that she was still alive living and breathing on the other coast. What is her deal? How is she here? Why is she running the same operations she was in Sector Two? I need answers.

As for suspicious characters, we still don’t know hardly anything about that guy who everyone calls the Professor. Sure, he’s an earlier iteration of the clone program that Nina and Ava were part of, but a man who calls himself John Smith is suspicious and even though we see where he ends up in this book, I’m not entirely sure that was his ONLY endgame. I just feel like that man still has something else up his sleeve but I don’t know what that could be.

We still have at least two more books in this series if all of the Silver Devils get their happy ending. I do feel like there was so much going on with this book though that we didn’t necessarily see the possible relationship build-up like I would have expected for the characters. Obviously there’s Conall and Max, but they barely interact in this book. They have one scene before what’s essentially D-Day, but what about AFTER. Something pretty significant happens and if they’re together at all in the aftermath, I definitely missed it when listening to this book on audio. Then there’s Mace and Ava who interact only a little bit in this book. I’m confused if their relationship also involves one of Ava’s friend clones who we get introduced to in this book, Beth and Phoenix. Will Mace’s story be polyam? I guess we’ll see.

I liked that we see Knox relaxing a bit from being JUST a captain for the Silver Devils. Well, I guess relax might not entirely be the right word but he’s focused his energy on other things as well. Like cooking and baking with the same intensity he has for mapping out a mission. He dotes on Nina and it’s so precious. But what’s even better is the child the crew rescued in book two called Rainbow, and we see Knox basically being a father to the child and it’s cute. I typically don’t even like kids in books, but Rainbow is an exception because I really like her.

What’s the deal with Luna? She’s still kind of a nonentity in this book and I’m so confused how she essentially disappeared from the series after the importance of her character highlighted in the first book. Like in book two, we still see more of her aunt than Luna herself in this book.

A character I wouldn’t mind seeing more about and getting her own book would be Savitri. In a way, she reminds me of Dallas because she runs her own little den of sex at her club. But would it be weird to ship her with Adam? Adam is a weird supersoldier/artificial intelligence who looks like a clone of someone she once loved. It probably would be a little weird but I like her and also want her to get a happy ending? I am a conflict of emotions where Savitri is concerned.

The Makhai project is mentioned a few times in this book and that’s a thing that was on the west coast that created my fav, Ashwin. But I’m confused what the Guardian Project is and if that was part of the same Makhai project that created the supersoldiers out west, or if they’re just related projects with the same end goals, and not necessarily the same thing project with different names. I’m not sure why the Makhai were mentioned in this book at all.

I feel like Jaden, a man who has a vast network across all of the south and east coasts would have more presence, but it seems like we barely saw him in this book compared to book two. For such a presumably dangerous and powerful man, I would’ve liked to see more of him. And a side note now that I’ve thought about it, is he the one helping transport O’Kane liquor to Atlanta? He would have the connections. But how and who would he have made the connection with in the O'Kane's?

The little snippets and email reports in-between the chapters in this book weren’t all that exciting until the end. It was mostly just filling in gaps nobody really asked for about what was being communicated between folks on the Hill. The reports in the first book was a look into the backstory of Nina (and I think Maya and Dani) and the Silver Devils. The second book had diary entries by Maya’s owner/mentor. And then this book was just communications between members on the Hill. The reports just didn’t feel as necessary by this book and I guess for continuity sake between the books, the reports in-between the chapters were added in, but I didn’t see how they were all that relevant.

It could be that the publisher had a hand in the editing here more than I’m used to seeing from the authors with their past book series, and while there’s still a lot of violence in these books, it also feels super toned down emotionally? I don’t know how else to describe it except the feel of the Mercenary Librarians series just never felt as emotionally raw as those of the Beyond and Gideon’s Riders series. Yes, there’s still sex scenes in this series but just never felt quite like the other books, you know? While I acknowledge the Beyond series might be a bit…much for traditional publishing these days, I would’ve still liked something more akin to the Gideon’s Riders series? I don’t know.

Maybe it’s because we’ve only had three books in this series to accomplish as much as all the books in the Beyond series and the Gideon’s Riders series COMBINED so everything felt much more condensed to get the whole plot hammered out in a shorter timespan, but I felt like this series was just okay rather a series I LOVE and would like to re-read.

Every problem I mentioned in the second book with the audiobook narration is still present here. Why does Lidia Dornet still randomly give characters accents and make them sound different anytime they show up? It’s a shot in the dark on what characters will sound like every time they speak. Sometimes they have southern accents, sometimes they don’t. It’s baffling.

Second issue with the audio is more with the audiobook publisher. Tor gave over audio rights to Tantor with books 2 and 3, and it’s a hit or miss whether Tantor keeps the audiobook covers or not and if they make the covers better or worse if they change them. They kept the normal ebook/physical cover for book two for the audiobook cover. But for this book they changed it all the way up and the audiobook cover suggests the book takes place in space, but we are not in space. We’re still in post-apocalyptic Atlanta for this book so I think I speak for everyone when I say we're still confused by the cover change. These books have to be read in order anyways, so I’m not sure what they meant to accomplish by changing up the audiobook cover because nobody should be jumping randomly into this series with the third book. I hope nobody is picking up this series thinking they’re going to get a space book. Because they will not be getting a space book.

The elephant in the room is that there’s no more books contracted with the publisher for this series, but the series is very obviously not done yet since there’s doors (and relationships) left open for more books. I know the authors have said they’re writing Hunter, book 4 in the Gideon’s Riders series and I’m totally fine with that because I also want more books in that series (maybe even more so than this one). If they decide to continue this series as a self-pub rather than traditionally publishing them, I hope they can do more with the characters and just go wild with the sex scenes and give us more of the vibes of their self-pub series injected into the Mercenary Librarians.

This book was fine and I LIKED Dani and Rafe, and all the other characters here. But “like” is not the same as feeling like I’m going to go feral for the characters like I would with the other books? It was mentioned that Dani and Rafe want to travel, so maybe they’ll make it somehow to the O’Kane’s and party it up. It was mentioned that they could travel to Dallas, Texas, but not to Dallas the person. But who knows. I look forward to seeing what the authors can do with this series in the future.

Time to play who’s the better killer

Rafe and Dani are both lethal operators, so this was, as expected, a more aggressive romance than book 2’s sweet one. There’s more sex than in book 2, but still on the whole more traditional than in the related Beyond series. The pretense that had them going undercover didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. Nonetheless, an entertaining story that has me hoping the series continues.

Love this book

This series is great! Can’t wait for the next book in this one and the Beyond series!