The Night Nurse and the Jewel Thief Book Review
Once upon a time, I found a site called NetGalley where readers (and reviewers) could request to read ARCs. Whoever told me about this site, my TBR has never been the same. This is my second ARC I was approved to read. Granted, I did get it after it had already been published. But I am one of the few who have reviewed this book on Goodreads. (Forty-eight ratings, to be exact at the time of this publishing.) I hope I can interest you in reading it too.
Overview
The Night Nurse and the Jewel Thief is a little on the nose with it’s title on what the center of the story will be about. Nancy Norman is a soon-to-be retired home care nurse who’s world has collapsed when a fire destroys everything she owns. Well, retirement was her plan before the fire. With the humble payouts given, she has enough to survive her retirement if she is modest. But Paris! She is 65-years-old and feels her life has gone by without her actually living it.
(Let’s not forget the very important, and independent, Dr. GoldenPaw. The most bestest orange Persian cat that saved Nancy’s life the night of the fire. Alas, our hero did lose an eye in that same fire. Cat parents and cat lovers, he will make you stressed more than I thought Nancy was.)
Nancy has always wanted to visit Paris. It is as glamorous as she makes all her belongings look. Give her a glue gun and some gems, she’s a bedazzling queen. Anyway, she needs to show her good for nothing ex that she can be spontaneous and adventurous. When her new and old friends set up a profile for Nancy on a dating app, she is being adventurous! If she matches with a charming man, its unexpected but welcomed. Stephen Sinclair is his name, and a lover of James Bond like Nancy, he is. But considering her house is gone and she can barely survive her retirement, how could she show her ex that she’s fine without him?
Enter the mysterious number that calls her and offers her an overnight nurse job. It’s her retirement day, but taking vitals for a wealthy billionaire for one night and get paid lucratively, why would she say no? I mean, it’s having nothing or get something … and Paris!
Nancy is in for more than she thought. Not only does Mr. GoldenPaw need to come along due to his hourly medicine needs, but she’s going remote off the shores of Lake Superior. Claude is who greets her, after having called until Nancy picked up, for the assignment. The Frenchman gives Nancy the lowdown: Gnut Berdqvist is our eccentric eco-activist billionaire. (Yes, an environmentalist billionaire. Let’s sit with that for a bit … because it’s too close to being an oxymoron.) He must not be disturbed in his ice castle, just have to check his vitals about 4 times throughout the night. Why? Well, that will be answered later. I almost forgot one of the important characters, GHOST. The home’s AI and Gnut’s invention. The sassiest AI I’ve ever met.
However, Nancy could not see how close her dating app match would be or how the night would go. A simple task of checking vitals soon turns into making sure she survives.
I have never been to Minnesota, my brother has, but this looks so pretty! Imagine owning a mansion off the lake, among the trees. Oof, what a life. Now would I want it to be an ice mansion called ice castle? Nah fam!
Review
One word review: speedo.
This word shows up roughly 59 times.
I gave this book a 3.75. It was a relatively fast read (relative because I think it is a known fact in my life that some books take me longer to read than most people when I’m busy). There isn’t much setup for the story. It starts and soon we get into the action. Nancy doesn’t spend one hour alone before there’s an attempted break-in. Which is funny because I thought Nancy was very chill for being stuck inside this home with bullet proof measures. This should start ringing alarms in you. Nancy ignored those. Why would you need such high security measures? Hmmmm.
I found Nancy as a character, relatable in the sense that she still is not satisfied with life. She is 65. I do not have much to look forward to because I too feel this way now. You mean I could continue to feel this way when I’m in my golden years? No!!
Yet, because she put so much of her true passions off for others, she doesn’t pick up on things that should spark questioning. An example, she matches with Sinclair and mere seconds later gets a notification from the app letting her know that her match is nearby. How? He’s British and supposedly not a mile away. She questions it for a second and then decides it must be a glitch. No, Nancy! You are so perceptive but don’t trust yourself!
This is very much her personality, though. Her mind goes in one track and gets distracted. Dr. GoldenPaw gets injured during the fire. She loves him with her whole heart. That is why she brings him along even though Claude says he hates cats. (Huge red flag for me because what?! My cats are my world! And I also like dogs, so what is with people hating cats?) So, when GHOST takes an immediate liking to him and plays with its laser to keep him entertained, why doesn’t she worry more? I got so much anxiety with her lack of hurry to get him. As a way to cope, I noticed she always said that he was smart enough to care for himself, and avoid danger. Kinda not true, but we cope in different ways.
(If you didn’t pick up on it, Dr. GoldenPaw is named that way due to Nancy’s love for James Bond. I quickly thought of Dr. No and Goldfinger.)
Still, you can’t dislike her. She comes off as genuine and her “you betcha” throughout is what I except from someone in the Midwest. (Don’t tell my brother’s girlfriend. She does not sound like this at all, hahaha.) She also does see the best in everyone. She is weary of Gnut, but she also wants to help him. At first. He’s more than shady. Having her as our protagonist was great.
We do get other POVs throughout the book. Sinclair is one, but his sections are small. From what little we do see, he is a vibe. He knows what he wants. Sure, he’s a thief but he’s a classy thief. Who comes into a heist dressed in a suit and tie? Sinclair does! A lover of James Bond, he emulates him in how he’s dressed and acts with his flirting. A very charismatic man for sure. Not for me, but it works for Nancy!
The other POV we get is Elvira. Her name gives villain. I did laugh when I read her name. I have never met anyone with this name and it was just so funny to me. She’s not really a villain, though. As you read, you will see that none of these people are good. (Minus Nancy and kind of Sinclair. He’s an honest thief.) Anyway, Elvira is not only a beauty but smart. She worked with Gnut to build and reveal their revolutionary cooling machine that can combat global warming by cooling the ocean water. Now they are caught up in a lawsuit. Elvira does not like being under house arrest due to Gnut claiming she tried to harm him. One is a liar to call out another liar.
The last character I did not mention previously in our book is JT. An ex football player who was head of Marketing for Gnut’s company. He too is under house arrest. He’s kind of tech savvy, but he’s so deep in his steroids and clearly suffering from CTE that I was afraid he was one heart attack away from dying.
… injected steroids into his left bicep …
… he needed thick glasses because he’d been hit in the head too many times.
We do meet Gnut, Elvira, and JT early in the book when Nancy does some research on who Gnut Berdqvist is. He is from Minnesota but has found a way to mask his midwestern accent. For the most part. Throughout the book it slips, and Nancy catches every time it does. Did I mention he loves speedos? He does. That’s all he wears and I don’t know about you, but I would feel so uncomfortable having someone going around in just a speedo.
Gnut is an environmentalist in the sense that he likes to pretend to love the environment when in reality he just has an obsession with these ice fishes. They are the walls to his home. The interior is a large fish tank that hold his pets. The ice castle is kind of a geyser. Which makes you ask, is his cooling device real? Not if you ask Elvira. Because from the beginning you see that these three are not to be believed. He is too obsessed with riches to really care for the environment in my opinion. He is smart, but highly vain. His personal assistant Claude goes along with everything he says and does. Why? That would a spoiler, hahaha.
As the story progressed, it did get more and more ridiculous in how grand it was. It felt hurried as well. There were so many things happening that were impossible, but on overall fun read. The book doesn’t take itself too seriously. Our antagonists sound and are ridiculous, which is part of the charm of this book.
If you’re looking for something light that won’t take you too long to read, I highly recommend because our Dr. GoldenPaw is the true hero of the story.
GoodReads | Fable | StoryGraph
So, our eco-activist billionaire Gnut is a fraud.
Surprise!
What a shocking reveal. You mean to tell me that a billionaire who is trying to make a bougie store a-la Walmart but with high end brands like Prada as his gift shop, is a fraud and not an actual environmentally conscious billionaire? No!
Anyway, I personally was not surprised. But this reveal is as to why there is a heist taking place at the ice castle the fateful night Nancy is working. Gnut has a nurse that always comes to checks his super duper low vitals as he rests. These vitals are a way to document that his health is bad. He’s barely alive. (He is healthy as can be, but is someone who has done deep sea diving so he can lower his blood pressure and breathing when sleeping. Perfect to lie about you hanging by a thread.) She’s out sick for the night, which is why Nancy is called. There is a lawsuit in action that need these vitals because Elvira and JT are only trying to drag his name through the mud, they’re the ones who are fraudulent. Not him! But in all honesty, they all are liars. Elvira did come up with an idea to make a cooling machine. However, it wasn’t a working prototype. There were gaps in the science and capability to create this. The prototype that Gnut is trying to sell is not a real. His ice castle is used with pumps and fans that freeze the lake water. The only reason his home is covered in a geyser is to make people believe that he did the impossible. Does he care for the environment? Yes, but not more than money and being bougie. Also speedos. He loves him some speedos. Speedos while sleeping. Speedos in his gift shop. Speedos with his name on it! Did I mention the word speedos showed up a lot in this book?
The heist is mainly to prove on camera that Gnut is not ill. He also has his own museum of sorts with these valuable jewels. Elvira wants the earrings. This is where Sinclair comes in. He’s a renown jewel thief. His goal, other than romancing Nancy, is to get the jewels. Now remember, Nancy likes to bedazzle. I wonder what will end up happening to these jewels. The shenanigans throughout the book are focused on Elvira, JT, and Sinclair breaking into the home. They try to override GHOST. It works for a bit, but GHOST is a highly sophisticated AI that I hope is never a real AI because she scared me.
GHOST thinks she’s in love with Claude. She thinks highly of him. But Claude and Gnut are in a relationship. It’s not said aloud, but very implied by the end. GHOST also thinks Dr. GoldenPaw is her cat, the moment Nancy introduces them. She likes Nancy. But Nancy also manages to outsmart her into helping. As JT tries to override GHOST, she seems to revert back a little, almost become sentient. Again, that is one scary thought. But Nancy promises she’s GHOST’s friend and that yes, Goldy is her cat.
We also find out that Nancy’s father had a criminal past. She never got to see him again, but wrote him letters because he had to flee the country for fraud. She has an internal struggle between helping Sinclair and being reminded of what her father did. The nagging words her ex-husband said to her give her a boost to aline herself with Sinclair. She was team Gnut until he showed her his gift shop. It was her “aha” moment in noticing he is a liar. In the time that she dressed with some of the high-end clothing because she was cold, she managed to take some morphine in a needle. Granted, her idea had been to put Gnut to sleep. But as they hide in his panic room (that has a secret entrance to the gift shop), JT manages to stop them from escaping when Nancy talks GHOST into opening the doors. Because this entire time, Dr. GoldenPaw fled, and the house is flooding from the broken or breaking fish tanks.
One sad part for Gnut, Elvira practically poisoned some of his fish. The other half eat the dead fish. Either way the home is flooding, which means trouble to the infrastructure of the home.
When I mentioned that the story got messy and unbelievable, it deals with the third act. Sinclair tries to steal the jewels. In the jewel room there are these robotic birds that attack him. They are the security measure. His ankles are attacked when he puts on a suit of armor that was in the museum. Dr. GoldenPaw had been in there, sitting on the bust with the jewels to avoid the water.
At the same time, Elvira is allergic to cats and has a personal vendetta towards Dr. GoldenPaw, but is also crazy. She uses C4 to blow the security barriers. This only worsens the infrastructure. She doesn’t care about this, she just needs to take a picture of the basement that shows all the pumps to prove the lie. But the basement is past the pool room, that is only getting more flooded.
While this is happening, Nancy, Gnut, and JT get in a brawl. Nancy was trying to escape but JT doesn’t go down easily. He and Gnut starting fighting it out. JT breaks the toilet. So to add to the flooding home is now poop water. Lovely. So, Nancy uses the morphine on JT instead of Gnut. She can outsmart Gnut, but JT is brute strength. JT takes forever to go down. Once he does, he’s face down in the water.
This gets even more ridiculous as it goes. Nancy and Sinclair have their own shenanigans. Nancy trusts Sinclair because he decided to save Dr. GoldenPaw instead of securing the bag with the jewels. Nancy bedazzles the real jewels into Dr. GoldenPaw’s already bedazzled carrier. The pumps all explode, the geyser is coming down!
They all make it out, even JT who is awake regardless of having a shit ton of morphine in his system. But the bridge over the mot is crumbling and a whirlpool is forming.
Oh, the mot. I forgot about the mot.
This mot is another aquarium with coral and all the jazz inside. Did I say this gets a little ridiculous? Because this is when I had to put the book down and say no way.
Nancy does save GHOST. She takes her drive. Claude comes right at the end to see the fall of the castle and help Gnut, his love. Nancy then pretends to throw the bag of jewels into Lake Superior, successfully going away, having survived the night.
Epilogue let us know that Nancy did make it to Paris, with Sinclair. They own a cafe, GHOST and Dr. GoldenPaw is with them. They also have a sanctuary for cats. A cat cafe.
The book ends with Claude and Gnut trying to retrieve the last jewel that did fall to the bottom of Lake Superior. And that’s it. That is the book. A good book, but that last bit did make me think about how unrealistically ridiculous it all became.
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