Spirited human-alien romance, with laughs and intrigue.

Great for fans of Ilona Andrews’s Innkeeper Chronicles, Dianne Duvall’s Aldebarian Alliance series.

Claiming Jill: The Love Wars Series, Book 3 Michelle Mars 260p, e-book, $3.99, ASIN B0C5V78KBF

“Do all Earth women come with hair between their legs?” asks the alien Nial in this frisky and funny third full entry in Mars’s Love Wars series. Like its predecessors, Claiming Jill centers a surprising inter-species romance between an Earth dweller and the Staraban, an alien species who made first contact—and lots of other kinds of contact, too—with this planet’s humans, vampires, and shifters back in Moving Jack. Each entry expands the story of Earth and the Staraban but boasts its own separate protagonists, in this case Nial, the head of Staraban security, and the hard-swearing, itchin’-for-a-fight Jill, the estranged daughter of the leader of MAD, or Make Aliens Dead, an Earth militia.

The novel kicks off with Jill and Nial in a classic pressure-cooker situation: alone together in a tiny spaceship, hurtling toward Earth after the mission of the earlier book, with loads of time to kill and just one bed. Mars introduces Jill first, in bitingly funny diary entries and POV passages, as she steels herself for the harrowing duty she feels

she must perform once home: killing her father. She’s annoyed but intrigued by Nial, but so hardedged (“The need to fight, to expend all of her anxiety was a living thing”) that readers may expect him to be put off, especially when she goads him into a physical fight. But no: Nial adores her. “While everything about her was hard, he had a feeling that she would melt for him,” Mars notes.

Their intimacy is earthy, spicy, funny, and complex, especially once the tense idyll of space travel ends, and they face politics, conflict, and Jill’s father, who’s capable of anything. Familiar faces from earlier books turn up, and while reading the series in order is recommended it’s not strictly necessary. For all the novel’s brisk storytelling, sharp dialogue, and spirited comedy, Claiming Jill never loses sight of the hard choices Jill faces, or their emotional toll.

Cover: B | Design & typography: A | Illustrations: – Editing: A | Marketing copy: A