Ashley Perrin is the fresh out of college new hire as the community services liaison for the city's Third District--the only district where the human citizens are the minority. The majority are aliens from a wide variety of alien worlds.
This includes all her coworkers in the Third District office, one of whom is a potted plant, whose assistant is very froglike in appearance. Oh, and she and her coworkers will go out for karaoke night. She'll have to sing. It's the traditional initiation.
There's the woman, who is human, who comes in to file a complaint about a city bus hitting her pet chicken. The chicken is fine, but the whole experience was just so traumatic.
There's the (alien) shop owner who wants something done about the noise level of the upcoming Annual Lupidian Celebration Parade. The shop owner is not Lupidian, and every year, the very popular Lupidian parade gets louder and more popular. Last year, it broke the display window of her sex toy shop.
She also goes with an Animal Control officer, to check out the report of two possibly neglected or abused spiderdogs in a back yard.
The spiderdogs are cute, cuddly, affectionate, and turn out to have a really, really alarming life cycle. Also, they're illegal. Also, they turn out to come from...well, you can't exactly call it a puppy mill.
The chicken, the sex toy shop owner, the spiderdogs, and the Lupidian parade are going to have a quite interesting collision. And no, the karaoke bar doesn't manage to stay out of it either.
This is just a lot of fun, and I'd love to see more of Ashley's adventures in her new job, as she continues to learn new ways of politely telling aliens that no, they can't touch her hair.
Go read or listen to it. Amber Benson narrates the audiobook, and she is, as always, excellent.
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