2019 SF/romance, fourth of of its series. Lucy Harris has also been
kidnapped from Earth into an alien civilisation…
But, with the initial trilogy complete, Diener paused in writing
these books and came back from a different angle. Lucy has not been
rescued by a heroic captain; instead she's been helped to break out of
the lab where she was being studied, and is now trying to find her way
to help on an alien planet, which turns out to be the Tecran homeworld
(the race that's been doing all this kidnapping, though it's still not
really clear why).
Meanwhile, after the events of the first three books, a treaty party
has arrived to take control of the Tecran military and government for
five years (after the previous kidnapping shenanigans, not to mention
building the banned AI space battleships), and various factions don't
want that to happen cleanly.
The core of the series is still there, but Lucy is quite a different
character from the earlier heroines; all of these protagonists have
dealt with their captivity by becoming mentally able to take any small
advantage that lets them rescue themselves, but she gets a lot further
on her own than the others before help arrives. And rather than being
in the confines of a ship with only a few people aboard or even a
space station, this book's set in a city on a planet, with crowds
(some of them potentially sympathetic) and plenty of ways for the
ungodly to hide.
Yes, all right, the basic plot is the recipe as before, but there's
enough variation here to revive my interest.