Bought with my own money. This post contains one affiliate link, to the Kindle edition on Amazon. If you buy through it I might earn a small commission, which costs you nothing and does not change what I write.
It is 3am and for the first time in years the thing in my hand is not a phone. It is a Kindle, showing The Winter of Frankie Machine, and I can feel my heart rate coming down a notch with every page rather than climbing the way it does when I am doom-scrolling something I will not remember by breakfast. This is new territory for this blog. Welcome to the first entry in Book Reviews.
How the phone won, and how it lost again
I used to read properly, years ago. Then insomnia and a phone within arm’s reach did what they do to most people, and reading quietly turned into scrolling. I work on my own most days, so I get through a stack of audiobooks, van journeys, dog walks, jobs round the house. Audiobooks are great company. But they are not the same thing as reading, and I had half forgotten that until recently.
The difference at 3am is bigger than I expected. A phone screen keeps my brain switched on exactly when I need it switched off. A book, or in this case a Kindle with nothing else running on it, does the opposite. No notifications, no next video queued up, nothing pulling me sideways. Just one story, at the pace I set. It is genuinely therapeutic in a way scrolling has never once managed, and getting back into the habit has felt like finding something I did not realise I had lost.
The Winter of Frankie Machine, on the surface
The book that pulled me back in was The Winter of Frankie Machine by Don Winslow, which I read on Kindle (same edition here). On the surface it is exactly what the cover promises. Frank Machianno is retired, running a bait shop on the San Diego waterfront, making sandwiches, minding his own business. He used to be a hitman for the mob, and naturally his past does not stay retired along with him. There is a manhunt, old scores, the whole mechanics of a proper crime thriller ticking along underneath.
Read purely as a thriller it does the job. It moves. I read most of it across a run of nights rather than one sitting, which for a book like this is unusual for me, and it never lost its grip between one 3am and the next.
What actually kept pulling me back in
What I did not expect was how often the story circled back to something quieter than the plot. Frank is a hitman, a man who has done genuinely bad things for money, and yet the book keeps returning to a set of values that have nothing to do with violence at all. Have a kind heart. Work hard. Look after your family. Value your friends. Those threads run right through the book, underneath the guns and the double-crosses, and by the end they are doing more of the work than the plot mechanics are.
It is an odd thing to take from a mafia novel, but it is honestly what stayed with me. Frank’s code is not a legal one and it is not a clean one, but it is a code, and there is something oddly grounding about watching a character hold to it even as everything around him falls apart. I finished the book thinking less about the shootouts and more about the fact that hard work and loyalty to the people you love are the same values whether you are running a legitimate business or, as it turns out, whether you used to run the other kind.
Did it actually help me sleep
Honest answer, not always, and I am not going to pretend a good thriller is the ideal choice for winding down when you genuinely want your heart rate to drop rather than to find out what happens next. There were nights I read on well past the point I meant to stop. But even on those nights it beat the phone by a mile. My eyes got tired the normal way instead of the blue-light way, and I was reading a real story rather than refreshing the same three apps out of habit. That is the actual win here, not perfect sleep hygiene, just a better way to spend the hours when sleep will not come.
It has also given me something to compare against the sleep data my Garmin Fenix 8 already tracks every night, for whatever that ends up being worth once I have more than a few weeks of it.
The verdict
The Winter of Frankie Machine is a proper page-turner that somehow also has something to say about the values that hold a life together, family, work, loyalty, even when the life in question is a strange and violent one. I would recommend it on the plot alone. I would recommend it more for what it left me thinking about after I put it down. Either way, it did exactly what I wanted at 3am. It got a book back in my hand instead of a phone, and that is worth more to me than the ending.
This is the first post in a new Book Reviews section. I have no idea yet whether it will end up mostly crime novels or go wherever the insomnia takes me. Given how this one started, I suspect it will be a mixed bag.
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I’m getting back into reading properly at 3am instead of scrolling, and this is where I’ll write up what’s actually worth your time. Subscribe and I’ll send you the next one, plus whatever else I’m testing.
About the author
I’m Pete Harrison. I’m 55, I run a business, and I have a mild case of insomnia that means I spend a lot of time at 3am reading about gadgets, gear and, lately, actual books. Things I Learnt at 3am is where I write honestly about the things I’ve actually bought, tested and lived with. No fluff, no rehashing the spec sheet. Just the real verdict from someone who uses this stuff every day.
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