The 3:00 a.m. Series (Books 1-5) by Nick Pirog

  

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Category: Adult
Genre: Mystery, Suspense
Content: Strong Language

 

Henry Bins is only awake one hour a day. 

Can you imagine only being awake for one hour each day? Can you imagine having to cram your entire existence into 60 measly minutes? (Two minutes to shower. Three minutes to eat. Five minutes to watch TV.) And in that 3600 seconds you have awake, imagine that you have to figure out:

- Who murdered the woman across the street? (You suspect it was the President of the United States, but can you prove it?)

- Why your mom abandoned you when you were six years old? (Was it because she worked for the CIA? Or was it because of your condition?)

- What caused your strange condition where you wake up at exactly 3:00 a.m. then fall asleep exactly an hour later, then sleep for twenty-three hours? (Were you experimented on? If so, by who?)

- And most importantly, what is Project Sandman?

Welcome to Henry Bins's life.

 

I had never heard of this series until I saw it on Book Bub for 99 cents. It looked interesting so I decided to go ahead and buy it. From reading the description I thought it was going to be a darker suspense thriller, which is what I was looking for. This however, ended up being an odd mix of mystery and suspense with some cozy mystery aspects to it. The latter is mainly due to the fact that the main character talks to his cat like he can understand what he's meowing at him, and the cat seems to understand him too. The cat behaves in many other ways that are not realistic for a cat at all as well, and I think it was an odd choice to include this in the series. It's hard to categorize this because there are F bombs thrown in at times along with the cozy mystery aspects, and that just makes it feel off kilter to me. It could have been a really good suspense thriller, but unfortunately I think the attempt at humor with the cat just made it seem far too unreal. 

I also thought this was a complete series when I bought it, but when I got to the end there was a cliffhanger and a couple of other unresolved things. The author has said there would be two more books in the series, but it's been 5 years since this last book was published, and all the other books were published within a year of each other, so I'm not holding out too much hope for an ending at this point. 

Overall this series was enjoyable, but not very realistic, and definitely not what I was hoping for when I picked it up. There is a nice message about time and how we choose to spend it because, of course the main character here has very little of it to spend with the people he loves. Realistically, I think him having a relationship that lasts would probably be next to impossible, even though he does find someone in the series who loves him enough to try. On a deeper level I don't see how a relationship could work and the challenges with this are not really addressed.

Apparently this been optioned by Sony Pictures, and I can see the appeal of making this into a suspense thriller type movie or TV show. I'm wondering how much it would end up resembling the original product if it ever gets made though. I think it could definitely be improved upon. 

As a whole I'm giving the series 3 stars because although it wasn't what I thought it would be it still kept me entertained and wasn't bad to read. Also these are short novella length books so this really just read like one whole book, but I'll go ahead and add my rating for each individual story here:

3 a.m.: 3 stars

3:10 a.m.: 3 stars

3:21 a.m.: 2.5 stars. This felt like a lot of filler to me, so it didn't get 3 stars.

3:34 a.m.: 3 stars

3:46 a.m.: 3 stars