Nightwork

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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. 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. This book hit me right in the heart for so many different reasons. Starting with losing a loved one to cancer, switching to having a teacher that means everything to you, and ending with the idea that life will always work out the way that it's meant to. 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." 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.

href: https://img1.od-cdn.com/ImageType-200/2390-1/{55C01898-08CA-406D-97CA-976E1C054A7A}IMG200.JPG I also loved the Red Goddess of the story. Megs, Dauphine, Sebastian... I loved the theatre kids both in college and at the high school. I want to start by saying that I tried to keep my walls up about our main character. He has so many names, but Booth is the most important. I tried so hard not to love him and failed completely. He was just a kid when he stole to keep his mother's bills paid while she fought the demon that is cancer. He was barely out of high school when he lost her. He traveled and changed who he was and existed in a world that never gave him a chance.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!!!! The characters are not developed at all. We also have insta-love which I don't recall Roberts doing for ages in her stand-alones. Prophets 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.” href: https://api.overdrive.com/v1/collections/L1BLQAAAA2a/products/55c01898-08ca-406d-97ca-976e1c054a7a/metadata 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.

For me, the sign of an awesome author is one who changes the tide of the story with such subtlety that you do not even realize it is happening. 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."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. 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! 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.