DEAL WITH THE DEVIL

Enhanced supersoldiers, hot romance, and a dangerous rescue mission make this SF series opener a post-apocalyptic roller-coaster ride.

In the near future, a wave of solar flares has rendered the world’s power grids useless. People have found a way to survive, though: by supporting a mysterious scientific conglomerate, by selling important information, or by acting as hired muscle. Despite his biomedical enhancements, Capt. Garrett Knox of the Silver Devils, a squad of supersoldiers, is in a race against time to rescue one of his team members. The ransom: a mercenary librarian named Nina. After doing some reconnaissance, Knox suspects that Nina is not a typical human, and his team’s plan to snatch her off the street is quickly ruled out. Instead, Knox hopes to lure Nina and her squad of information brokers into a trap. Knox insists he knows the location of the rumored Rogue Library of Congress, a motherlode of confidential documents and records that were saved by federal employees when the original Library of Congress was shut down. Nina can’t resist a score like that and agrees to assist Knox in locating the RLOC bunkers hidden across a decimated America. Nina and Knox feel a lot like superheroes with their enhanced abilities and altruistic feelings toward ending corruption through the freedom of information. Readers may be craving an action-packed good-triumphs-over-evil story right now, and this book delivers a hopeful ending in the midst of a bleak setting. Rocha’s trademark trope of found family is very much present, and the chemistry and tension between the romantic leads has never been better plotted or paced. The primary shortcoming is the constant repetition of background information, which creates frequent hiccups in an otherwise thrilling page-turner.

A risky and frisky adventure.