Nightwork

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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’). Like I said, I liked Booth. I loved going along with him on his adventures. And I felt some anxiety that he would be discovered. NR made him nicely clever and resourceful. A book begging to be read on the beach, with the sun warming the sand and salt in the air: pure escapism.

While the fashionable method of short, separated paragraph units sometimes impedes the prose, Pol’s understated wit is fine company 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. 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.

He fell in love with the ocean, the hills, New Orleans, North Carolina, and a beautiful girl named Miranda. He read, and educated himself and did everything he could to follow the rules he set when he was only 12 and doing the only thing he knew could work. When that all caught up to him, and he had to leave it all behind, he didn't think he'd fall in love with anything again. But isn't that just human nature? So he fell in love with a house. With his students. And with the same girl. And he would not be ran off from it again.

We follow the life of Harry Booth, whose mother was diagnosed with cancer and became a thief to help make ends meet. After she passed away Booth continued his nightwork and never stayed in one location for too long, fearing that his enemy will catch up to him. 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.

Nightwork" follows Harry Booth who at age 9 starts stealing to support his mother who is undergoing chemotherapy treatments. When his mother eventually dies, Harry still keeps stealing and breaking into homes hence the title of this book. Harry eventually meets a woman called Miranda and starts to think about a different future, but is threatened by someone who wants to use his skills. 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.

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." We grow up with Booth and watch his talents as a thief evolve until he actually gets a rep (a good one) amongst the underground and attracts the attention of a man, LaPorte, who begins to think of Booth as much of a possession as the art and baubles he hires Booth to steal. But Booth has no plans to be anyone's possession. url: https://samples.overdrive.com/?crid=55c01898-08ca-406d-97ca-976e1c054a7a&.epub-sample.overdrive.com href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-150/2390-1/{55C01898-08CA-406D-97CA-976E1C054A7A}IMG150.JPG A lifelong thief needs to pull off one last job—while getting revenge and keeping the woman he loves safe.

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The fact that the lead male commits crimes might be difficult for some readers to accept easily. But Harry Booth is not your usual down and dirty thief. I know – I know -- you’re thinking that a crime is a crime and should not go unpunished. But it’s fiction! And it’s Nora Roberts!! And the writing is marvelous!!! And the story equally so!!!! href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/2390-1/{55C01898-08CA-406D-97CA-976E1C054A7A}IMG200.JPG At the 57% mark it got slightly better because we stayed in one location for a longer period of time, but by that time I just wanted to finish this. However, the plot took an unexpected turn, it was something I’d expect in a rom com. 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.

New York Times bestselling author Nora Roberts introduces an unforgettable thief in an unputdownable new novel… The bad guy LaPorte was an absolute idiot. NR can and has built extremely twisted villains, but sometimes, like The Witness with Russian mafia, these villains seem straight out of PatheticVille. If I have to hear about how scary and mean and cold a person is, I need to see my main character overcome problems and challenges on the way to best the bad guy. But there is absolutely none of that, which is ridiculous. 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. Three woman who join together to rent a large space along the beach in Los Angeles for their stores—a gift shop, a bakery, and a bookstore—become fast friends as they each experience the highs, and lows, of love.I wasn’t expecting to like this book as much as I did — NR’s last few have been a disappointment for me, and the last stand-alone book of hers I truly enjoyed and have reread numerous times was 2012’s ‘The Witness.’ I finally had the time to read this book. And I ended up reading it in one sitting!!!!! It was SO GOOD!!!!! An unsettling example of writer, prophet and protagonist collapsing into one character. Isao is a young nationalist militant. Obsessed with the historical account of a group of samurai who performed seppuku in the aftermath of a failed coup, Isao organises his own plot to assassinate a group of prominent capitalists. Arrested and imprisoned, Isao experiences a number of dream-visions in which he foresees his own death. In one he is killed by a venomous snake and at the same time has a realisation: “I was not meant to die like this. I was meant to die by cutting open my stomach.” At the novel’s conclusion, Isao assassinates the capitalist Kurahara and then performs seppuku. A year after the publication of Runaway Horses Mishima himself staged an ill-fated coup and followed suit. href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/2390-1/{55C01898-08CA-406D-97CA-976E1C054A7A}IMG100.JPG