Alien in the Family, by Gini Koch

Sometimes it’s a mistake to pick the third book in a series to read first. The prologue and back cover of this book was promising, because the 1st-person voice is dry and amusing. While the author manages to keep up that voice throughout the book, sometimes I felt like I was repeatedly being hit by the same “joke stick,” over and over again.

Now to specifics. Here’s what the back cover promises:

Planning any wedding is hard enough, but Katherine “Kitty” Katt and Jeff Martini have a lot more to worry about than seating arrangements, because multiple interstellar invasions, Alpha Team in mortal peril, and inter-alien conspiracies are all on the guest list—and the gifts they’ve brought contain some explosive surprises.

Kitty and Martini should be happily finalizing their wedding plans. Kitty’s biggest worries should be about winning over Martini’s mother, finding the right dress, and lining up her bridesmaids. But protecting the Earth from assorted alien threats seems to keep getting in the way.

The discovery that Martini is actually a member of the Alpha Centaurion Royal Family brings additional bad news—emissaries are on their way to see if Kitty’s royal bride material. And they’re not the only things coming from the Alpha Centauri system. Amazonian assassins, spies, alien beasties, shape-shifters, and representatives from the Planetary Council, combined with a tabloid reporter who’s a little too on the mark, create a deadly situation for Kitty and the rest of the Alpha Team. When the assassins strike far too close to home for anyone’s comfort, Kitty realizes it’s going to come down to more than throwing the bouquet—she’s going to have to face an entire planetary consciousness and dethrone a monarch in order to make it to the church on time…

But don’t expect anything more. There’s nothing much else in the book, except for (gorgeous) men drooling over Kitty and her fiance growling at them (literally). Apparently, to know this girl is to love her—but the new reader won’t have enough knowledge of Kitty to understand why she’s been put into a (vague) position of authority where everyone takes her theories as gospel. About a third of the way into the book, a new reader will realize that all the other female characters will play insignificant parts and be hustled off-stage as fast as possible. Even the alien woman medic (more advanced than human medics) will be replaced by a (gorgeous) med student off the street that Kitty recruits. And, by the way, the promised conflict with Martini’s mother [back copy blurb] never happens. The new reader will also be subjected to more than a hundred pages of expensive-dream-wedding-in-Las-Vegas events after the climactic show-down [not a spoiler, but from back copy blurb: “face an entire planetary consciousness and dethrone a monarch…”]

This reads like an homage to Koch’s characters, not a complete novel. I felt the characters and relationships were not seriously tested. However, if you check out the Amazon.com comments you’ll find this book thrilled some loyal readers. I highly recommend you read the previous books first and then, if you love Kitty, read this one.