Unfortunately Kay Hooper jumped the shark
In this one. I have loved the SCU books and thought the Haven books were fairly good but these Bishop Files books were odd to begin with and in this last one?
SPOILER: Aliens? Really? And a talking cat for frosting. Starting a search for a new book series now. ( )

This book just might be the last book in the Bishop Files series. You don't have to have read the other two The First Prophet and A Deadly Web but they do really help. I will say it's been so long since she's written a Bishop's Files book that I had forgotten a lot of the other books and I was fine reading this one without that knowledge, though I now want to go back and skim the other two to see what I missed.

It opens with a woman named Siebring forcing psychics to do tasks to their breaking point even when they aren't trained and have never used their abilities before. One of them is a psychic and is trying to help Henry a non-psychic to hang in there. They're all hoping that Bishop will come and find them and save them since they know him and know he would help them if he could.

Bishop and Miranda, meanwhile are answering a call that facility for pregnant psychic women is in danger but get there too late and it is burned to the ground with everyone inside. The unborn babies were powerful psychics and reached out to the United States and every person with special abilities. This galvanizes the movement into action against those who have been acting against psychics and been taking them and getting them pregnant, which turns them into Stepford Mommies because of the method they use to impregnate the women. Or they experiment on them to death. Someone went rogue and burnt up this facility or their plans have changed for pregnant women.

Murphy, a higher up in the organization against them is in contact with Duran of their side who is in charge of one side of his Alien race's faction. They came here to escape seek reinforcements for war back home and those reinforcements are psychics. At first, they tried to make themselves psychic but didn't seem to have any success with that. Any children the men had with the women would be girl children. What they were really looking for were pairs. Male and female paired psychics because they were quite powerful together, sharing their powers. But they couldn't produce a male on their own and the males they stole and tried to mate with the females never bonded with them and the females who became Stepford Mommies never bonded with their children. But even once they fixed the Stepford Mommy problem by not impregnating them and trying to get them to mate naturally they would choose different partners because the male would come across as a stalker.

Tasha was such a one. She had been born in one of those facilities but was believed to have no abilities so she was adopted out to a family and watched her life. She hid her abilities but they figured out she had them anyway and set her up with a crazy psychic that they had plans for political office and Murphy asked Duran to take care of him that Tasha was bonded with Brodie and he was dangerous and needed to be destroyed and he could sell it to his people that he was unnecessary as he had no one to bond with and he was taken care of.

A battle is about to take place between both sides. Murphy knows the location of a great number of the facilities and Bishop is looking for the labs. They intend to go on the offensive. Will Duran help them or not? This is a great little series within a series but a first you're like aliens? That's where you're going to go with this? But then it all starts to make sense and the story falls together in a good and interesting way. My only question is what will this mean for her regular series going forward. Will it impact it in any way? With how this book ended my curiosity is piqued in how she will continue. I love her books and this one is no exception. The characters are intriguing, I mean there's a psychic cat in this book and it absolutely works. I give this book five out of five stars. ( )