Gini Koch - Touched by an Alien

Marketing manager Katherine "Kitty" Katt had just finished a day on jury duty. When she stepped out of the Pueblo Caliente courthouse, all she was thinking about was the work she had to get caught up on. Then her attention was caught by a fight between a couple that looked like it was about to turn ugly. But ugly didn't even begin to cover it when the "man" suddenly transformed into a huge, winged monster right out of a grade Z science fiction movie and went on a deadly killing spree. In hindsight, Kitty realized she probably should have panicked and run screaming the way everyone around her was doing. Instead she sprinted into action to take down the alien.
In the middle of all the screeching and the ensuing chaos, a hunk in an Armani suit suddenly appeared beside her, introduced himself as Jeff Martini with "the agency," and then insisted on leading her to a nearby limo to talk to his "boss." And that was how Kitty's new life among the aliens began...Touched by an Alien is the thrilling first installment of the Alien novels.

Comment: Another one of the books languishing in the pile (this one since 2011) because I liked the idea of them years ago.

In this science fiction story, with some romance as well, we meet Katherine "Kitty" Katt, a young woman who is just leaving after jury duty and suddenly, she sees a couple fighting and then the man transforms into a monster right in front of her. Kitty is not the type of person to hide so she quickly realizes something in the man's neck seems to be controlling him and she picks a pen from her purse and somehow attacks that weird thing and the man dies. Even quicker than her actions, she sees a couple of government-looking agents approaching and they kind of kidnap her, impressed by how resourceful she was. 

This is how Kitty sees herself - and then later her parents too - in the middle of a human-alien alliance and the trouble caused by an enemy bent on destroying the planet. Everything seems confusing but Kitty is confident she can help her new alien friends to finally do something about a threat they could not manage for so long and she even has time to fall in love...

It was probably the reference to a romance that caught my eye and made me interested in reading this novel. In the PNR world, aliens and sci-fi worlds aren't my preference in general but I've read enough to have an idea of what I like and what I don't like as much. I hoped this would be an interesting story which also happened to have characters falling in love. 

Perhaps I wasn't counting on two things, which seemed to be key for the development of this plot: the sort of comedy tone and the fact Kitty is way smarter than everyone else in this book even when she hasn't enough information to prove anything, just randomly correct guesses. I suppose this wouldn't be too bad anyway, had the characters been well fleshed, interesting, complex, layered, or, for instance, if the whole functioning process of how aliens and humans came to live together had been more organized and well interwoven into the world in general.

Instead, this felt more like a type of Men In Black story and I can't say the comedy aspects were always that well done. A lot seems to rely on the abilities of everyone and I can confess I was more interested in the way things came to happen and how the lives of the main characters mattered in the big scheme of things. There are enemies to pursue and defeat and of course it's great that there's a goal in the story but it feels granted that the "good guys" would win, so the supposed secondary issues seemed more interesting.

However, it felt as if what the author wanted to stress out were the differences between the aliens (from Alpha Centauri) and how Kitty, a newcomer to this reality, seems to always do the right things and guesses a lot from inference and some clues, often making connections which aren't that obvious to begin with but still prove correct. Kitty seems to be this amazing wonder woman and I could ignore this if everything else was good, but sometimes it wasn't so. then, when her mother turns out to be a member of the Mossad... I mean, the ideas used were all cute and fun, yes, but the execution, the development of those ideas just didn't really win me over.

The romance, which I was looking for to see happening, started quite well, Jeff, the alien love interest was one of those guys who is confident and immediately showed off and started to tease Kitty about how good they looked together and I thought he would be one of those goofball heroes who would turn out to be more serious and reliable than his fun personality seemed to indicate but he, as most of the other secondary characters, never went from the surface into something more. In the end, I was glad he and Kitty were a couple but I wasn't truly invested in them emotionally.

At some point, I felt a bit confused by how things were progressing, why that specific way and even the bad guys' intentions and plans didn't seem to matter that much anymore. I've finished the rest of the story not in awe of Kitty's amazing deductions and abilities, but eager for the end. Unlike other books, I suppose I can summarize things by saying if I could live in any fictional world I wanted, this is not one I'd choose and I won't read more in this (very) long series.

Grade: 5/10