There appears to be a glitch listing this as part of an Elric collection. The Patricia Anthony book is a sequel or part of a series in an alternate history wherein the little gray aliens took over America around the time of the Kennedy assassinations (which they engineered in that timeline). I don't know how good the previous installment "Cold Allies" was (for some reason I get the impression it was better), but this one just wasn't very gripping. The story is told from the point of view of Reen, an alien who is White House Chief Of Staff for a President Womack, who has apparently been kept alive and in place for many terms since the takeover, and yet is not a complete figurehead. Seeing how that situation came about, or more on the society of the aliens themselves, which seems to both have some depth and appears genuinely alien, would have made for good reading. Without that, what remains is a tale of two conspiracies, the aliens trying to keep quiet an ongoing existential threat to humanity, the humans trying to quietly engineer one for the alien race. It's readable and will pass a few hours pleasantly enough, but this reader is left with the impression that all the really interesting stuff happened in the earlier volume, and the ending is frankly a total non sequitur. ( )