I am very surprised by how very good this was.
I've read the infamous "beyond shame" and was intrigued by a book with an actual plot by the same duo.
I liked their character work and was intrigued even by the little bit of the world I actually saw but I never expected this amount of attention to detail.

The cast managed to be actually badass without slipping into cringy clichés (for the most part). The world and the tech in it are very believable and well thought out which still baffles me as it seemed like the authors didn't know the first thing about guns or tech and neither did they seem to care in the beyond series.

I can't praise the world-building enough. Finally, we don't just have the one evil overlord that wants to rule the world (or some bullshit like that) but a complex network of factions and moles with various goals and motivations.
There is one big bad company that has its fingers in all the pies and is the main adversary I guess you could call them but so far it seems like the authors understand that a company is just a collection of individual humans. So it's not at all the typical chain of increasingly difficult bosses with the big end boss on top.

The characters in this book felt like real human beings with complex emotions and nuanced thoughts.

Leading up to the first big climax the story started to drag. Their goal was quite some time away yet but the emotional development and setup for the climax were already done at that point so nothing interesting really happened for quite a while.

I am usually a sucker for a single POV but this book does a good job of managing the various POVs.

Sadly, this book has an incredibly cheesy ending that went very much against the gritty and dark atmosphere the rest of the book maintained and there are pacing issues towards the end of the book.

I am worried after that cheesy ending that the next book will fall for the cheap clichée trap of the good underdogs as so many do but I will definitively read it.

Please leave your characters grey! They have so much more depth and are far more interesting that way!

Edit: fuck it, this gets 4 stars. ( )

With a series title of "The Mercenary Librarians", how could I not read it? I've read and watched a bunch of stories with post-apocalyptic librarians. Nina is no Alpha (from The Odyssey tv show), but at least she has a personality, unlike other works in this subgenre.

It's a post-apocalyptic romance between a kick-ass librarian and a supersoldier. Hits the standard romances beats: the main couple (man and woman) falls into instant lust but their jobs and loyalties divide them. Will they ever have sex? Will there be misunderstandings that could be avoided if they just talked with each other? Will people from their dark pasts appear as antagonists? Are their friends all the best at what they can do? You betcha, plus bar fights and cage matches.

So. Here is what I liked about the novel. Queer relationships are completely normal; in fact, the heroine has had relationships with men and women. Most of the main characters have received some kind of enhancement, so their super skillsets have in-universe explanations. And Nina's main focus is on finding new books (and media) that they can digitize and share with people in their neighborhood.

( )

I'm going to DNF at about 20%. It's probably a fine start to a series, just not one for me. I'm not sure what I was expecting. Whatever it was, I didn't find it. Good luck, other readers! ( )

Mercenary Librarians!! Character and setting reminds me of Kate Daniels series.

The Mercenary Librarians and the Silver Devils are all part of experimental programs with implants, genetics, and cloning. Their reality is a time in the future after several wars, causing much of the United States to be a wasteland. Rising from the ashes of those wars are power-hungry companies who are using technology to improve their version of the human species. Knox and the Silver Devils have left the control of one such company called TechCorps and are in a race that might cost them their lives if they can't stabilize their implants before the kill switch inside kills them all. Nina mourned the loss of her sisters but has moved on by helping the community where she lives to survive by providing security. When Knox comes to Nina with a proposal to help each other, Nina doesn't know that she is being offered up in exchange for the one person who might be able to help Knox and his team.
The Mercenary Librarians refers to Nina and her team who protect and disperse the knowledge of one of the few remaining libraries to others for a price. The book is written in chapters that are mostly numbered and told from 3rd person omniscient point of view, but every one in a while, there are chapters labeled with the names of characters who narrate what is happening from their own perspectives. Among the unique features of this book are the internal memos at the beginning of each chapter from the corporations that originally programmed Knox's and Nina's teams, giving some background into what happened to create all of these damaged individuals. Overall, this was a well-written futuristic story with some romance elements that works on all levels. ( )