As much as I love Nora and will continue to read her books, they’re rapidly becoming repetitive if you’ve read most of them. However, this is a good book for a newbie, or even if you’re an old-timer who wants a satisfying read. 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… href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-100/2390-1/{55C01898-08CA-406D-97CA-976E1C054A7A}IMG100.JPG 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.

The second is that NOTHING GOES WRONG, not even a single major hiccup. Everything came together TOO seamlessly. I felt in suspense, but then nothing even happened. 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. 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. 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.

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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. A lifelong thief needs to pull off one last job—while getting revenge and keeping the woman he loves safe. 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! At the climax of this story, a misanthropic and judgmental Tennessean grandmother pleads with an antinomian serial killer – the Misfit – for her life. She appeals to his sense of decency but the Misfit is concerned with a higher form of goodness than charity, and a lower form of evil than murder. With her last breath the grandmother blesses the Misfit unawares: “You’re one of my babies,” she says. “You’re one of my own children.” After the grandmother’s death, he muses that “she would have been a good woman if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life.” O’Connor described the Misfit as a “prophet gone wrong”. For just one divine minute, through communion with the Misfit, the grandmother is transported out of her homespun hypocrisy and into a universe of grace.

Wow, what a great character! At the age of nine, Harry Booth's mother has cancer. She owns a cleaning service with her sister, Mags. When she was too ill to work, Harry goes with his aunt, but it wasn't enough for her medical bills, he was worried about foreclosure. Without her knowing, Harry starts going into homes and taking small things. He never takes more than what he needs and he never "breaks" into a home. From the get-go, Harry has a code of conduct. In the meantime Booth meets Miranda and they begin a relationship that comes in LaPorte's cross hairs. Eventually Booth decides he must take care of the LaPorte problem for good. sortTitle Nightwork A Novel crossRefId 6492972 subtitle A Novel id 55C01898-08CA-406D-97CA-976E1C054A7A starRating 4 OverDrive MetaData isPublicDomain False formats While the fashionable method of short, separated paragraph units sometimes impedes the prose, Pol’s understated wit is fine companyProphets often appear in tragedies as beacons of the saddest sadness of all: that we are all fated to do the things that we do. From the Weird Sisters to Willy Wonka, prophets are employed by writers as the bearers of this very bad news. In Oedipus Rex, Sophocles’ blind prophet Tiresias is forced to tell tragic mother-effer Oedipus that he has no free will, and that “to his children he is both brother and father”. Like all prophets Tiresias is a lonely interloper in the world of normal time. “Alas,” he wails, “what misery to be wise.”

FYI, I almost DNFed this thing four times. It was painful to get through. The flow was so bad. I did start to skim towards the halfway point because I found myself not caring a whit about what was going on. 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. Beyond everything else, I loved the plot so much. I'm a BIG fan of heist movies, and I never expected anything like this book from Nora Roberts. The plot was so entertaining from beginning to end.

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.