Jacob is book 1 in Jacquelyn Frank's Nightwalker series. I had mixed feelings about this book. The story itself wasn't bad, but I had a bit of a problem with the characters. The, ahem, "heroine" got on my nerves. A lot.
The story is about Jacob the Enforcer and Bella the Helpless Ninny. Jacob is a demon and his job is to enforce demon laws. The main thing Jacob has to do is to keep any demons from engaging in hanky-panky with humans. Demons are so tremendously strong that a human would not survive the ordeal. Jacob's job gets even more difficult during the Samhain and Beltane moons, where demons are basically ruled by their baser urges and start running after humans left, right and centre. But then the unthinkable happens: he starts wanting the forbidden too.
Enter Bella.
Bella is a book worm. She's a librarian so, "naturally", there isn't a whole lot of excitement in her life.They meet while she's leaning out of a window star-gazing. Then while they're having their little tete-a-tete, Bella falls out the window. She wasn't pushed. She wasn't backing a way from a bad guy. She didn't even trip. She was just leaning too far out of the damn window. And then Jacob catches her. And to do so he kinda had to float himself up to a height where she wouldn't be too badly hurt by his grabbing her. And she doesn't notice that while he's holding on to her that they're floating 10 feet in the air. Now, I don't know the conversion from feet to metres, but I do know that 10 feet is effing high! How can you not notice? I know us book worms have a rep for being less than observant but this is ridiculous.
And the asinine behaviour doesn't stop there. After Jacob uses Bella as a divining rod to find a rogue demon, Bella simply passes out from the ordeal of seeing a demon (sounded a little like those demons you'd find on Scooby Doo, if I'm honest). Jacob takes her to his place, strips her and gives her his shirt to wear. When Bella wakes up she seems to be unconcerned about several things that I'm sure a normal person would be more than a little freaked out by. Firstly, she is in a strange man's house. No one has any idea where she is. Secondly, she is only wearing his shirt. That's it. She's parading around like this in front of a complete stranger. A final complaint about Bella (I swear I'll stop after this) is that she cries. About everything. I kinda wanted to get in the book so that I could give her something to cry about.
To be fair, Bella did get a little less useless as the book progressed but by the time she pulled her head out of her butt, I had decided that I didn't like her. I might have liked her more if we had been given a bit of insight into her character before the window incident. Just some indication that something that stupid was not in character for her.
I didn't hate all the characters though. Jacob was okay. I really like Noah, the Demon King, and Elijah, the demon's sort of military commander.
This book was nice in that it was just something to read, but I'm not going to be waiting anxiously to see what happens next.
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