I´m quite sure that what I´m about to write is also influenced by a particularly condescending discussion (concerning the uselessness of female scientists and the superiority of US science) I got involved in today, so take it into account that I´m in a oversensitive mood, especially concerning these topics.
I haven´t finished listening to the story ´cause I´m already annoyed at it and I´m not interested enough in it to find out the twist. I reckon can figure it out from the other comments here and, if that´s it, it´ll just annoy me more.
I have a feeling the author meant for the heroine (I´m going to use Romance genre descriptions here) to be Trillian (several dropped half lines about wanting to get off planet even if she stole his ship, and about being over qualified). This may have worked if the author actually followed that through, but didn´t. Rather it appeared she cut the heroine´s backstory so that she came across as a shallow, husband hungry, predatory woman to start with and then a pathetic, weak, sappy, stereotypical Romance heroine. It was inconsistent
and horribly, horribly, shallow and condescending. Stuff that I´d expect to read in a Harlequin book with Fabio on the cover, but not listen to here. Thanks to the author for sticking up for the gender alongside all those Britney clones out there.
The second thing which got up my nose was the US-centricness of it. Yeah, ok, the author is USian but come on already! The US constitution is the important one? Not the several thousand years of work on constitutions before that? Simply Wikipedia it and you´ll find a reference to Aristotle´s work defining constitutional law, the Roman, Japanese and Islamic constitutions -what about the Magna Carta?- that predate the US constitution by, oh, just a little. The suggestion in the story that the alien had travelled ALL over the US before setting foot in London? The idea that Hollywood is all that´s on offer? Eytanz is right that there´s little point in nitpicking the logical underpinnings of the story, but to me this just made the author sound ignorant and arrogant.
So this is where I´ve ended the story and I have no desire to listen any further. I did enjoy Blink, Don´t Blink, so I´m massively disappointed that the author wrote such a shallow story with this kind of female lead. And, like I said, I´m waaaay sensitive on this subject today.