This is the final installment in McCoy’s Starlight trilogy about alien women coming to Earth. Not having read the previous entries, I wondered if I would have a problem getting the story, but that was no issue. I got the story, I just didn’t like it terribly much.

Mira is a woman on a mission: to find Lucas Diamond and have sex with him until she gets pregnant. She’s never met him before, and doesn’t even know what he looks like, but she’s determined to have his son. The future of her people depends on it. Mira, and eight other females from her planet, have come to Earth with no less than survival in mind. Their “very advanced” race has tinkered with genes and gone wild with cloning in an effort to achieve perfection, and while all their women look like supermodels, all their men are impotent (there’s a joke in there somewhere, but I’ll let it go). The elders of the planet have decided that Earth sperm is the solution, so they’ve recruited nine females to travel incognito to Earth and bring back half-Earthling babies. Mira, as the adopted daughter of one of the high elders, is especially committed to her goal, and is sort of the leader of the group.

Coincidentally, Lucas is looking for her – not to have hot sex, but to find an alien. Lucas is head of the top-top-top-secret Division of Interstellar Activity, a government agency on the watch for aliens. A strange burst of nine “stars” headed right for the United States has DIA on high alert, and Lucas in a frenzy of hopeful excitement, thinking his lifelong dream of meeting creatures from another planet is about to come true. One of the “stars” they track has even landed right near his home town, Washington DC, and Lucas goes out to the scene himself. Sadly, they can’t find a little green man, so Lucas goes back to the hotel where he’s staying. In the elevator, an incredibly sexy woman comes on to him, and invites herself back to his room. Tired, frustrated, and horny, Lucas agrees, and they have their hot sexy night together. But in the morning she’s gone, and Lucas can’t believe that he doesn’t know her name, or that she had the nerve to leave him, but he’s not about to give up on having sex with her – er, seeing her again.

Luckily for him, Mira did not get pregnant that first time. She comes back for more, since she can’t go home without a baby. Lucas sleeps with her again, but starts asking questions, like her name and where she’s from. Mira’s got a story prepared, but it falls apart when Lucas checks up on it, and then he begins to suspect something strangely like the truth. Unfortunately, a renegade army general also suspects the truth and will stop at nothing to use government resources to catch an alien and sell it to the highest-bidding collector for his own personal profit.

In a book like this, one has to suspend a certain amount of disbelief; there are aliens out there who look just like us (but better), and they want to have sex with our men! OK, fine, but when building a whole new world, the author should try to have it make sense. On Mira’s home planet (which is never named), scientists manipulated genes until they rendered the men impotent before anyone realized things had gone too far. Why was such an advanced civilization so blind to the consequences of their actions? If they populate their planet mostly with clones of perfect people, why do they need an infusion of babies created the old fashioned way? And if their civilization is indeed on the verge of disaster, so endangered they’re forced to resort to primitive Earthlings for sperm, why do they only send nine females to get pregnant? Why not nine hundred? And since they target the Earth men based on a semen analysis, why don’t they just come buy a big shipment of donor sperm and inseminate all their women?

Then there’s the romance. After two nights with Lucas, Mira feels incredibly sad that she’ll be leaving him soon, that the only memory of him she’ll have will be their son, who will look just like his father and make her heart ache with loss forever. The weepy sentimentality of it made me roll my eyes. She doesn’t know him. She knows a few things about him, but besides having sex, he’s done nothing with her or for her to engender any sort of feeling. When there’s a conflict between her sworn duty to her home planet and being with Lucas, even when he’s being a jerk toward her, Mira comes up with a multitude of reasons why she should ignore her duty. This only made me think her world was in bad shape indeed, if it truly did depend on her getting the job done. Things do work out, because this is a romance novel, but not because Mira is determined to make them work. Other events and characters do things to make everything come out peachy, and it all would have happened faster if Lucas and Mira hadn’t kept stopping to take naps. There’s a stretch when things seem to be building to a climax, then they go off to get some rest. Things build up, they need to get more sleep. Things build up again…I just thought for something as important as alien visitors, Lucas could have pulled an all-nighter.

The concept of sex goddess aliens was quirky enough, but then the quirks devolved into cutesy and contrived. The plot meandered, with people popping in and out without development or relevance. The villain was pure evil and paper-thin, and only served to prolong the story for more hand-wringing by Mira, more suspicious growling from Lucas, and more napping from both of them. I can’t recommend it just for its otherwordly aspects, because they’re just wallpaper in the background, and despite the title it’s not a steamy book. Filled with big secrets, refusals to communicate, and characters who aren’t nearly as strong as they’re alleged to be, this is only a ho-hum read.