The End of Nightwork is a novel rich in provocative and timely ideas, yet seductively readable. While the fashionable narrative method of short, separated paragraph units sometimes impedes the prose, Pol’s understated wit is fine company. And despite the novel’s complex philosophical and theological underpinning, its characters are always vividly alive. There’s a rare originality here, and a willingness to take risks, that promises great things. A lifelong thief needs to pull off one last job—while getting revenge and keeping the woman he loves safe. New York Times bestselling author Nora Roberts introduces an unforgettable thief in an unputdownable new novel... 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.

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. 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." 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. 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. While the fashionable method of short, separated paragraph units sometimes impedes the prose, Pol’s understated wit is fine companyThis 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. 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. Perhaps as a way of coming to terms with this, he looks for meaning in the past. An earnest autodidact, the adult Pol begins to research a book about Bartholomew Playfere, a fictional 17th-century tub-preacher who predicted ecological cataclysm. According to Playfere’s pamphlet The End of Nightwork and the Sundering of the Curtain in Twayn, the end of the world will begin not in the Holy Land but on an island off the coast of Connemara. Pol is so inspired he chooses the island as his honeymoon destination. He also feels a strange kinship when he discovers there are gaps in the prophet’s history: “His life story seemed to leap from his childhood to … his ill-advised pilgrimage to the island where he and his followers lived out the rest of their lives awaiting the coming apocalypse.”

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.

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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 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.’