Axiom's End, Lindsay Ellis

Cora is not having a good time. Her low rent existence is already a mess of government intrusion because of her dead-beat and secrets-leaking father. But into this comes a nearby "meteorite crash" that unleashes an alien with an interest in these extraterrestrial secrets and what exactly Cora knows about them. After a rocky start involving Cora's kidnap and fitting with a tracker / mind control technology, a reversal in the fortunes of the alien, dubbed Ampersand, forces a more balanced relationship. But this new bond brings an honesty that reveals the reason for Ampersand's visit and the unwelcome implications for humanity's future.

It'd be a more than a little rude to describe this as a mash-up of a First Contact story and the Mismatched Buddy genre, but that's not entirely inaccurate. What starts as something a little like "Predator" , with Cora stalked by a powerful alien with invisibility technology, becomes more like "Leon", with Cora becoming front-of-house for Ampersand's tetchy stand-off with the US authorities. And it works through all of this, with both leads becoming more filled-out as the novel progresses, and with a solid first contact backstory slowly teased out.

Definitely recommended.

One thing that did slightly irk me is that, for reasons that never became clear, this is also a period piece set towards the end of Dubya's tenure as US President. While this does allow the author to alternative-history defenestrate him, it's never really a big thing in the book, so comes across as merely a quirky choice. Perhaps it's trying to draw a parallel between the fictional government keeping alien secrets, and the real one hiding war-on-terror ones, but, if so, it's never drawn out definitively.