The End of Nightwork

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The main character aging differently than most people? A fantasy, parallel history with interesting prophets and mythology? 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’). This book featured in the 2023 version of the influential annual Observer Best Debut Novelist feature (past years have included Natasha Brown, Caleb Azumah Nelson, Douglas Stuart, Sally Rooney, Rebecca Watson, Yara Rodrigues Fowler, JR Thorp Bonnie Garmus, Gail Honeyman among many others). You may also opt to downgrade to Standard Digital, a robust journalistic offering that fulfils many user’s needs. Compare Standard and Premium Digital here. Sometimes I'm a book snob. A stupid book snob, it turns out. I've never read Nora Roberts before. Never. I guess I assumed any author who wrote so fast and was so popular would be shallow and formulaic. Nightwork blew that stupid assumption away. Now I know Nora Roberts is popular because she's an excellent writer!

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.’ They're happy enough, even if having a young child has put something of a strain on their marriage.

At some point he gets a job as a tutor for the adopted daughter of two friends �� a disabled artist and social activist Cynthia who becomes involved in the Kourist movement which has grown on Reditt LaPorte was easy to hate, but in later portions of the book, he was less dimensional as a character, as where his henchmen. 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. But with his condition dormant, Pol and his wife Caroline manage to live an ordinary life in London. 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."

La Porte didn’t feel like the dangerous villain of the story that he was meant to be. Their first meeting and conflict wasn’t intense enough for me to feel like Booth needed to fear La Porte and live his life in hiding. I just didn’t feel the danger or urgency. When Booth was forced to do a job I thought there would be more time spent on the heist and having to leave his life behind but it was breezed through. Change the plan you will roll onto at any time during your trial by visiting the “Settings & Account” section. What happens at the end of my trial? It was interesting, and perhaps a little unfairly detrimental on The End of Nightwork to read this after the powerful Ti amo told by a narrator caring for her husband dying of cancer, which covers this topic much more powerfully. 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.

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. Roberts really is an accomplished story-teller, making this very readable, with characters who endear themselves to the reader and repay the investment of time and emotion. And this story has everything a reader could want: food, theatre, theft, love and romance, and a clever sting to turn the tables on a ruthless collector. Enjoyable, entertaining and hard to put down. The End of Nightwork’s apparently discursive style, moving from the mundane to the fantastical with dry humour and piercing observation, masks its clever interweaving of ideas: on how our physical bodies both define and belie who we are, the significance of age in political and social life, the power of cults to mobilise and persuade, how unreliable fragments of memory shape our identity as individuals, families and cultures. Meanwhile, the everyday conflicts and compromises he and Caroline experience are heightened by his condition and the response of the people around them to a man who is always either older or younger than he appears. Meanwhile, Jesse begins acting out at school and Pol’s mother’s dementia and his own increasingly vivid dreams lead him to re-examine the knotty dynamics of his family. 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.