What do You think about The Jonah (1999)?
for one thing, the book was slow – it took forever to get exciting. But most maddening was the character of Ellie. She was supposed to be a police officer, but she was a complete and total wimp, constantly breaking into tears and having to be comforted by the hero. She was completely unbelievable as an officer of the law, and completely unprofessional as well – it is ridiculous that she would not call in the cavalry as soon as Kelso was kidnapped. She doesn't even wait to see if he's okay before driving off on an errand of her own and then manages to get herself captured as well when all she had to do was make a single call to the precinct to come and rescue them both. She was there only to be the love interest and a victim that Kelso had to rescue. Their romance was completely contrived and unrealistic also, and I was annoyed at Herbert's habit of calling her the "girl" in a demeaning fashion when she really should have been called a "woman."
—Sarah
Basically, I have the same complaints and same praise that I have for most James Herbert books. The overly detailed and gratuitous sex scenes just had me rolling my eyes and rushing through the words as fast as I possibly could. Not quite as bad, but also useless and jarring is the switch to random people's viewpoints during an event. I don't much care what some random old man is pondering as he's about to die, I mean, if I wanted to read that, I would have read an introspective book about life or something like that. The love interest was also incredibly obvious and had basically no character of her own, which is sadly typical of Herbert. The villains were nearly one-dimensional and kind of disappointing, but that wasn't a huge issue with me.However, I did like the overall pacing of the book and the length was almost exactly perfect to get the story across and not waste my time. The extra viewpoints at the end padded it out, and were absolutely unnecessary in my opinion. Strangely, I kind of liked the flashbacks, which I usually hate, but here seemed to work once I was about a third of the way in.Overall, this was a rather good Herbert book, probably top ten for me.
—Ubiquitousbastard
