Nightwork

Nightwork is a standalone romantic suspense novel by Nora Roberts, published in 2022. It follows one man across two decades, from a Chicago childhood into a career as a professional thief.

Harry Booth starts stealing at nine years old to keep a roof over his mother's head while she is dying of cancer. After she is gone he leaves Chicago and keeps up the nightwork, drifting from the Outer Banks to Savannah to New Orleans, changing names, staying careful and unattached, and refining a thief's code he mostly keeps to. Then he meets Miranda Emerson, and the attachment he has spent his adult life avoiding takes hold anyway.

Booth has also collected dangerous obligations, chief among them Carter LaPorte, a wealthy collector who treats him as an instrument. Knowing what LaPorte would do with any personal connection, Booth cuts Miranda loose without explanation and disappears — a decision the rest of the book works out the cost of. It is a heist story and a long-arc love story at once, with the confrontation Booth has spent years deferring waiting at the end.