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.

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. 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. A book begging to be read on the beach, with the sun warming the sand and salt in the air: pure escapism. I loved every relationship he made along the way. I loved Aunt Mags and Sebestian. I love that there was so much happy inside so much sad.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. 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. 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." 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.

href: https://api.overdrive.com/v1/collections/L1BLQAAAA2a/products/55c01898-08ca-406d-97ca-976e1c054a7a/metadata 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. 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. sortTitle Nightwork A Novel crossRefId 6492972 subtitle A Novel id 55C01898-08CA-406D-97CA-976E1C054A7A starRating 4 OverDrive MetaData isPublicDomain False formatsWhat 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. 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.