Nightwork

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href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-400/2390-1/{55C01898-08CA-406D-97CA-976E1C054A7A}IMG400.JPG Harry Booth started stealing at nine to keep a roof over his ailing mother’s head, slipping into luxurious, empty homes at night to find items he could trade for precious cash. When his mother finally succumbed to cancer, he left Chicago—but kept up his nightwork, developing into a master thief with a code of honor and an expertise in not attracting attention—or getting attached. Will Damron was just about perfect in his storytelling and characterizations. I particularly liked how his female voices sounded normal, not affected like some male narrators tend to go. It’s a long story and his voice tone made the time fly by. He’s got serious skills. Now, my problem with too expansive stories - a huge range of time, too many events, too many places, too many people but not enough character building. Or at least not enough of it words, which is what counts here. I could guess a lot of this guy's character building was there - under the surface - because he had to repress all his feelings to get his 'nightwork' done in tne beginning, and this repression ended up being a survival technique. But having to guess something like this feels like being shortchanged.

Mantel does something brilliant in this book: identifying the analogy between the prophetic experience – living outside time – and the experience of trauma. Alison Hart – a medium and survivor of childhood abuse – lives between worlds, between the past and the present, between the living and the dead, between the astral plane and Aldershot.

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Harry is also just kind of blah. I also wasn't in the mood to root for a thief. I feel like a little bit this was a little of her trying to do another "Roarke" type character for her readers. We all know that Roarke started off stealing as a kid and of course got involved with criminal gangs in Ireland and then New York. Most of the dialogue and circumstances about him I think were supposed to read as thief with heart of gold, but I just kept rolling my eyes. Also Harry does have "relations" with other women in this book so when you get to the whole "heroine" in this one you wonder why it even matters. I will add that I think that most of the books where Nora just follows a "hero" it does not work as well for me, see my review of "Shelter in Place." sortTitle Nightwork A Novel crossRefId 6492972 subtitle A Novel id 55C01898-08CA-406D-97CA-976E1C054A7A starRating 4 OverDrive MetaData isPublicDomain False formats

The only part in this book that I genuinely loved was the one which had Harry's mother. That's really the only point where I empathized with Harry, which is also why I felt entirely too much and cried like a baby. Thanks to his love of acting and theatre, Booth is by now expert at switching identities, and escapes the country to avoid LaPorte’s further demands: he will not be owned. But he doubts this man will ever tire of his pursuit, and begins to long for a more settled existence: a job as an English/drama teacher in a mid-size town would fit the bill. And does, until someone who knows him arrives… This one just wasn't for me :(. I want to feel conflicted about rooting for a morally grey character but I just didn't feel anything for Booth. So of you do like him, then this could be a winner for you! I also loved the Red Goddess of the story. Megs, Dauphine, Sebastian... I loved the theatre kids both in college and at the high school.Harry winds his leisurely way, as Silas Booth, to New Orleans, learning, always learning, discovering new things, making good friends and continuing to pay his way with a little nightwork. When a fence put him in touch with an accomplished thief, he ends up stealing a Turner sunset. The client insists on meeting him, but Silas is wary of the offer this privileged but greedy man makes. url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=55c01898-08ca-406d-97ca-976e1c054a7a&.epub-sample.overdrive.com

Also as others have pointed out this book skips forward in time a lot and changes locations. It honestly reminds me somewhat or some of her older books like "Risky Business". I know she's done the time jump thing before, but think that only "Under Currents" has done it to great effect in her latest books. I think that's because we stayed with the hero for a time period before moving to the present day. And we didn't stay long in the "past" either before shifting things forward in the story. Eventually the book does stop flip flopping around which helped with my reading. This story starts out with an unusual main character for a Roberts story. A guy. A kid really and we are with him as he tells his story and grows. He educates himself in ways we cannot believe. He loves hard and works hard. He protects what and who he loves always. He continues to learn and grow. New York Times bestselling author Nora Roberts introduces an unforgettable thief in a new novel of suspense, greed, love, and survival... This was incredibly slow paced, I just couldn’t get into it. I didn't feel connected or invested in Booth so his experiences and travels were boring to me. I love morally grey characters but I’d simply describe Booth as a nice guy and a good person. My only criticisms are that her writing style is changing to ‘more telling, less showing’ (with fragmented, choppy sentences rather than paragraphs) and Harry/Booth was too perfect. He’s clearly a blend of Nora’s many memorable male characters, but he most strongly resembled Luke Callahan from her early book ‘Honest Illusions’ (another favorite of mine), while Miranda, with her doting father and red hair, was a Roxanne expy; even Sebastien was too similar to LeClerc. The side characters were an afterthought, but I enjoyed Mags (who reminded me a lot of Mavis, from the In Death series) and Dauphine (who, again, was reminiscent of the female lead, Lena, in NR’s early book ‘Midnight Bayou’).New York Times bestselling author Nora Roberts introduces an unforgettable thief in an unputdownable new novel... bioText: NORA ROBERTS is the #1 New York Times bestselling author of more than 230 novels, including Legacy, The Awakening, Hideaway, Under Currents, The Chronicles of The One trilogy, and many more. She is also the author of the bestselling In Death series written under the pen name J.D. Robb. There are more than 500 million copies of her books in print. I think it's time for Roberts to just write a straight up mystery and forget about the romance side of things. You can feel her itching to do it. This is supposedly romantic suspense, but it's so light on that it feels like a misnomer to categorize it as such. It doesn't help that we follow a character (Harry Booth) that is so morally grey you have to wonder why Roberts has him as our "hero."

I just adore Harry! He makes me think of Frank Abagnale from Catch Me If You Can. Although he doesn't hurt or kill people, his moral codes make me think of Orphan X. The boy now a man has skills, he stays under the radar, a bit of a loner but eventually falls for a girl. He's brilliant at math, tech, languages (5?), and literature. He cooks gourmet foods and even bakes his own bread! What an exceptional read!! Nightwork by Nora Roberts is a standalone novel with an excellent range of characters – just as Ms Roberts always writes. Mags was wonderful, and the love she had for her nephew stood out. The people we meet on the way through Harry’s journey play a great part, some good, some not so good – just as they’re meant to be. I thoroughly enjoyed this stunning romantic suspense novel – such a pleasurable read - and have no hesitation in recommending it highly. href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/2390-1/{55C01898-08CA-406D-97CA-976E1C054A7A}IMG100.JPG What really didn’t work for me was how events were glossed over and we would skip forward in time so when I feel like I’d start to immerse we'd jump somewhere else. I feel I’m being told, not shown most of the time. pissed-off points for the romance, which took the lazy way out by being a 'love at first sight' - because that somehow explains how easy all of it seemed. Even for the parts when it wasn't easy - for example, when Miranda struggles to reorient her own principles to accomodate how strongly she feels for Harry - there's barely any justification. Easy answer: she's in love, so she accepts everything.I finally had the time to read this book. And I ended up reading it in one sitting!!!!! It was SO GOOD!!!!! I want to start by saying that I tried to keep my walls up about our main character. He has so many names, but Booth is the most important. I tried so hard not to love him and failed completely. He was just a kid when he stole to keep his mother's bills paid while she fought the demon that is cancer. He was barely out of high school when he lost her. He traveled and changed who he was and existed in a world that never gave him a chance. An all important point before all else: I make it a point to not judge characters for things they do for love, but had I been rating this taking into account how I felt about Harry's nightwork - this would be a -5 stars, no doubt. This nightwork begins with having to pay for his mother's cancer treatment - and I can see that. I can see why that made him desperate, how right and wrong did not matter - if that nightwork money meant his mother got her treatment and could continue living in their house. But everything that Harry did after his mother died was a conscious choice, and I will never understand that and neither do I want to. I feel like the point of this book was to show how a man could be a thief (an actual, stealing for personal profit thief) but still have 'morals'. There was a whole lot of justification for his work, how his 'why' (of which there was none, in my opinion, after his mother was gone) made him a 'good' person, and how he was 'different' from the rest, how his work had 'rules' and 'principles' which somehow made him better than people who killed like brutes, but I completely fail to understand or empathize with him. Most importantly, I refuse to.