This book is part of the Alien Huntress series, of which, I believe I've read a couple though I cannot recall the titles off hand. Basically the background of this series is that it takes place on Earth at a time when aliens are no longer sci-fi, they are, in fact, the newest immigrants. There are a variety of species who pop up and while a great many of the new citizens are peaceful, there are of course the occasional 'bad apples' amongst them. This is what prompted the formation of A.I.R. (kind of an FBI type of organization except they deal exclusively with bad aliens). The hero of the book, Jaxon, works for this organization and we begin our story with him trapped in a cell, having been tortured for an unspecified amount of time.
Enter our heroine Mishka Le'Ace. Mishka is an assassin who was created in a lab. She is part human, part machine, part animal (which animal(s) we are never told). This mixture makes her a particularly effective killing machine for whoever owns her at the time. Yep, I said 'owns'. See, it turns out that Mishka has a chip that was implanted in her brain when she was a child that allows her to be controlled by whomever has custody of her control panel. It's not like a remote control, how dull would that be, rather it grants the power of life and death over her and the ability to 'punish' her with excruciating pain at a whim. As you can imagine, this makes for a rather interesting childhood and such.
So Mishka has been ordered to rescue Jaxon. No biggie for our assassin except she finds herself strangely attracted to him. (What a surprise!) So she whisks him away to a safe house provided by her employer/master. Of course Jaxon was not rescued out of the goodness of anyone's heart. She is supposed to find out everything that he knows about a new race of aliens that have come to Earth who have been infecting human women with a nasty virus that causes them to a.) slowly start to rot while living and b.) turn into icky cannibals. As Jaxon is badly injured, Mishka must care for him for several weeks before she can even attempt to interrogate him. Enter strange attraction--it grows between both of them (duh) and eventually they do the deed.
Neither one will admit that they are falling for the other. Ho-hum... Then Jaxon is re-rescued by his teammates from A.I.R. and things start getting more interesting. Two of his teammates have met Mishka before and let's just say they don't like her very much. Oh the tension! Meanwhile, they are still tracking down the mega-STD aliens. It turns out that these aliens have already decimated at least two other planets (one of which was the home-world for an earth-born alien who works for A.I.R., which ties another book in nicely).
Enter action, excitement, blah blah blah... and eventual resolution of both the alien issue and the Jaxon/Mishka issues. Yea for happy endings!
So, overall I did enjoy this book quite a bit. It's definitely light reading but the pace is good the characters are interesting. The romance/sexiness scenes are amusing, if a bit drawn out. I particularly like that there are several areas that tie the stories together. Each book that I've read (so far) is a decent stand alone but they all share an underlying theme that is definitely a build up for the final story. It is done subtly enough to intrigue. I will be interested to read more of the series.
Grade: B+
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