2016 SF/romance, third of of its series. Imogen Peters has also been
kidnapped from Earth into an alien civilisation…
For me it's the Thinking Systems, the illicit AIs placed at the
cores of space battleships, who are the real stars of this series.
Their builders have given them enough comprehension to be able to plan
a means of achieving a goal, but (perhaps because they were not
intended to be autonomous) not bothered with any ethics, which they've
having to invent from scratch. Why not simply murder all their
former captors rather than restraining them and dumping them somewhere
safely? Well, that's the trick that the various Earth women (the only
people able to see the Thinking Systems as people rather than as scary
stories from the big war hundreds of years ago) have had to work out.
So all the books have been variations on that theme, but there is
progress overall as well—a mission has been sent to see what's going
on after the events of the previous book, and there are still space
pirates out there. The women get the chance to talk with each other
rather than just have their individual romances. It's a very
constrained series, but it does at least treat the SF content as more
than merely backdrop so that women from Earth can meet hot alien
captains who fall instantly in lust with them.
The idea that the aliens are rubbish at lying seems to have been
quietly dropped, but they still regard music as rare and special.
Imogen is a music teacher, and I'd be interested to see what would
happen if she used standard techniques from Earth on one of these
aliens… but no sign of that yet, alas. She does have the presence of
mind to work out that even an amateur Terran singer can hold a room of
aliens spellbound, and she takes reasonable advantage of this.