This book is a perfect example of why I have an exceedingly hard time abandoning books. I did not understand what was going on at the beginning of the story, but after the first third or so, it really picked up. I still think that there would be benefit in having the idea of "driving" explained in a more accessible way -- I never really understood what was happening but the suspense and pace of the story were good enough that I was able to just sort of accept what the Night Time experience was supposed to be without really "getting" it. I loved the relationship with the brothers and feel like the MC had a very redemptive character arc. I wish we had seen more of Mira's backstory -- she was very important towards the end but didn't have much in terms of all of her motivations fleshed out. I also wanted a little more from the ending -- it felt a bit like the story was just suddenly over. I think some kind of epilogue or something that gave an idea of what happened to the MCs would have helped. So, mixed bag but I am glad I stuck with it!

The Night Time is the Right Time by Meritt Graves

The synopsis of the book and the beginning of the book were excellent. I soon found myself confused and floundering as I tried to figure out Logan Harrison and the story. He is a man that is living in what is definitely the future, has made some less than wise decisions, and has tried to do his best to provide for his brother and himself after their parents died.

I ended up skimming the story rather than reading word for word and found that this time period has a great deal of AI in use, companies are ruthless as they are now but perhaps even more so, and that Logan is renting out his body to make money to support Nate and himself. The kind of renting being done sounds a bit like what happened in Ghost when Patrick Swayze took over Whoopi Goldberg’s body but with more sci-fi elements and for much less positive reasons.

There is a great deal of talk about drugs, the companies, AI, who is behind the murder that begins the story, who to trust, and whether or not the world will end soon if things are not figured out and fixed.

This book had a great deal of potential but left me floundering with all of the people, changes in who they were or might be, mention of drugs I’m not acquainted with, and scientific information that left me behind. This is a book that may appeal to some and really hit the spot but for me it was just “okay”

Thank you to NetGalley and Enoviu Press for the ARC – This is my honest review.

2-3 Stars

I love the story, not bad. Its a good book to read. Logan Harrison jolts awake in a hotel bathroom, confronted by the stares of three lifeless strangers. A knife is nearby, and blood’s everywhere. Dazed and horrified, he can only wonder: Had he been “driven” on The Night Time is the Right Time—a revolutionary, full-immersion body-renting platform? That’s the only explanation, yet his dashboard shows no rentals.

With sirens wailing and the shadow of a nameless driver lurking around every turn, Logan must stitch together the evening, uncovering why someone would want these people dead and why they’d want him to do it. This means journeying inwards, re-examining events from a harrowing past few years, in which he lost both of his parents and spent eighteen months in prison for an assault charge that continues to haunt him.

The Night Time is the Right Time is a pulse-clipping, character-driven technothriller that plunges readers into a vortex of intrigue and unrelenting peril, challenging them to confront a fraying world on the brink of unprecedented digital upheaval.

There were pockets of interest however overall I am not a fan of this book. I found myself trying to remember what made me choose to read it. The only conclusion I could muster was that it is different. While I liked the concept of the story, I found the delivery fell flat. There was too much going on with the added technical/virtual concepts together giving a sense of mental whiplash.

Voluntarily reviewed after receiving a free copy courtesy of NetGalley, the Publisher, and the author, Merritt Graves.

While I liked this book and was ultimately entertained by it, I feel like the author';s research into the subject matter was extensive, and they wanted to prove it by putting every singe ounce of information they learned into the narrative somehow. And so it became bogged down in multiple parts with exposition and paragraphs of things I, as the reader, did not need to know. It interrupted what was actually a fun and unique story.

Thank you NetGalley for allowing me to receive this book for an honest review.

Unfortunately, I found this book not to my liking.
I am just not into sci-fi tech type books.

For this reason I had to put down.

Thank you to NetGalley and Merritt Graves for an eARC of this book in exchange for an honest review.

I have to DNF this book for now. The title, cover, and premise of the story are all really appealing and I was really excited to read it. It sounded like a great tech sci-fi. The first chapter started off strong and thrilling. Aaaaand then it was just over-complicated and over-used tech-speak (and I say that as someone that is well-versed in online gaming and technology in general). The line that really had me questioning whether or not to continue was, "I'd be a noob to think otherwise." The gameresque language and slang used seemed excessive.

I officially lost interest when the flashbacks were introduced and it seemed like there were never-ending articles about some technologies relevant to the story. And pages upon pages in italics. For the love, why?! So painful to read.

I am hoping to try reading this again in the future because it really did seem intriguing. Another time, though. I will edit my review when I decide to reread.

I really, really tried, but the pacing on this is so abysmally slow for the trope it started out with I finally gave up. The author writes well, and does an excellent job of character development, which is what makes his constantly repeating the same information endlessly so frustrating. At first I thought I was just wrestling with the age difference, since I haven't been the protagonist's age for a very long time. Eventually, though, I realized the real problem was that the pacing kept getting bogged down as he repeats what amounts to the same background material when it really isn't needed any longer.

The world building is superb, and a little terrifying if, like me, one is aware of the ongoing effort to make technology the new religion, so if you want to use that as a review quote, be my guest. For what amounts to a murder mystery, though, events just don't move fast enough for my taste.

This was an amazing book. I highly recommend it to everyone. Great characters and a great plot. I will be looking for more books by this author. The book is superbly written. Lots of twists, turns and shocking turns of events

I was really excited to read this one. It sounded like so much fun, especially since I've never really meshed some of these genres together.
After the opening chapter, I was so hopeful. But it seems the opening chapter was a fluke.

I think part of the unenjoyment was the lack of organisation in the story. I'm not sure if this is meant to be intentional or not, but the random flashbacks ended up just getting confusing and I had to stop a lot to check where I was and if I was still "on track".

I still think that the idea is great, the premise is there. I do however think that the execution was way off. This hasn't turned me off Merritt's books, I really hope that I can get one I enjoy more in future.

Thank you to NetGalley for an advanced copy in exchange for a review. The Night Time Is The Right Time is available now.

The future portrayed in Merritt Graves’s The Night Time Is The Right Time is bleak. AI has been programmed into every conceivable device - cars, factory lines, home appliances, the homes themselves - and taken over the vast majority of jobs, leaving the narrator and protagonist, Logan, without prospects or hope. The only employment opportunities available to him and everyone born outside America’s top 1% are drug dealing or selling oneself on “The Night Time is the Right Time,” a dark web service whereon renters can “drive” the body of another person to indulge in their addictions, persuasions, and perversions without damaging their own bodies. Logan begins the book having tried to give up dealing drugs and begun renting himself online. The novel opens with him waking up after a Night Time session in a hotel bathroom surrounded by the people a “driver” used him to murder.
Graves writes in a mad rush of sensations, slang, corporate and chemical terms, and tech-speak, and as a result the narrative can be blindsiding and hard to follow. This is often compensated for, however, by the depth of the themes explored and of Logan’s characterisation. He is a complicated, self-contradictory character, lost in the madness of the time he was born into. Growing up in the circumstances he did - i.e. outside the aforementioned 1% - left him with very few options, and an accordingly limited number of choices. While the few he has made were almost uniformly unwise, the chance and ability to make better ones were denied him by the circumstances of his birth. He is caught in one of humanness’s timeless questions: is a person to be judged by their choices or by their circumstances?
The Night Time Is The Right Time is at root Logan’s redemption story. His mission to solve the mystery of the murders committed by his driver, who erased all trace of themselves from Logan’s record of “drives,” is not a quest for justice, but an attempt to do at least one worthwhile thing with his life. Before he was presented with this mystery he was the drug addicted guardian of his younger brother, Nate, and had done time in prison for assault. This mystery, however, provides him with an opportunity to achieve something constructive in a world that has tried to force him into apathy at best or, at worst, destruction.
Unfortunately, the onslaught of technical terms slows the pace of The Night Time Is The Right Time; the action scenes are cumbersome; the narration quite repetitive. So, despite the book’s depth, it is a slow, confusing read. Graves deserves serious commendation for the thought and consideration put into these characters and themes and for the brilliant melding of the sci-fi and noir genres. But what could have been a great thriller was rendered into a long, plodding novel by stylistic clumsiness. The Night Time Is The Right Time is a very interesting crime novel, but not a thrilling one.

This took a while for me to get into it. The story starts with the main character waking up in a hotel room with blood, bodies and drugs all around but with no recollection of how he got there.. Though this style of writing is not for me, I would recommend to give it a read !

I found the technology talk in this book confusing. It is action filled but I still felt the book had too much tech talk. If you like that kind of thing, then this is for you. I felt it went on too much with technical jargon and I found myself daydreaming.

Thank you to Netgalley and the publisher for allowing me to share my unbiased review on the book!

I really wanted to like this book. After all, its dystopian/SF/technothriller, its about a subject I’ve seen movies about and I liked the blurb.
However, I didn’t count on the fact that apparently, I’m getting too old to follow this kind of writing. I tried, I really tried but I got more and more confused and couldn’t follow the story at all. I was disappointed because the opening chapter is really great. I think Merrit Graves has a lot of stories to tell, and the writing in that first chapter was interesting, but sorry… I read some reviews later and it seems I’m not the only one who had trouble with actually reading the book.

Thanks to Netgalley and Enoviu Press for this review copy.

Following their parents' untimely deaths, Logan Harrison looks after his younger brother, Nate & keeps him in school by selling drugs & also by working on a site called 'The Night Time Is the Right Time' - a body-renting platform allowing strangers to 'drive' his body for the night. 'Drivers' take over the 'rentals' for a period of time which allows them to live vicariously through another. Usually Logan is 'rented' by drug users but this time, he wakes up in a hotel bathroom: there are three dead bodies in the room & a knife from his home is nearby. Logan's first instinct is that a 'renter' did this but there are no bookings shown on the platform site. Logan flees the crime scene, knowing it's only a matter of time before the police catch up with him, but when one of the deceased turns out to have connections with a company linked to the Night Time platform, he wonders if it is all connected. Can Logan clear his name or will he lose his brother forever?

I actually kind of liked this one. The AI theme is 'The Net' meets 'Person of Interest' & I loved both the former film & the latter tv series. The concept of being able to rent someone else's body so that you experience the emotions & sensations but not the physical repercussions opens up a whole raft of questions & ethical dilemmas. There's also a running theme of scepticism towards AI which I think is topical seeing as we are just beginning to see the possibilities & pitfalls but are seemingly going full-steam ahead. There's several films on why this is a bad idea (SkyNet anyone?) I found the MMC to be fairly easy to empathise with, he made bad choices but like many desperate people, he felt he had little choice. The pace was slow to begin with but picked up & by the end it was a full throttle action flick. So why did I rate this 3.5 stars (rounded up)? The ending was a bit of a let-down. Unless there is going to be a follow-up, the reader doesn't really get any concrete answers or conclusion, & I felt a bit cheated.

My thanks to NetGalley & publishers, Enoviu Press, for the opportunity to read an ARC.

Firstly, thank you to Merritt Graves and netgalley for providing me with an ARC in exchange for an honest review.

So this book has a really interesting premise/prediction of a dystopian future. Technology has advanced far enough that the uber-rich can pay to “drive“ someone’s body which people primarily use to abuse drugs without consequence to their own body. This world is also a technological nightmare with surveillance everywhere + facial recognition. In this world, our hero Logan wakes up alone in a hotel room with several murdered people around him. He was driven and left there to hold the smoking gun...

Overall, I like the concept of this world and the intriguing premise/plot but unfortunately, the writing and characterization heavily bogged this book down. The MC is quite unlikeable and the writing (from the perspective of his drug addled brain) is usually uninspired game slang and occasionally hilariously bad. For example, we have this gem: I’d be a noob to think otherwise. Give me a break.... The ending was also super abrupt and does not do enough to tie together the story so overall, I was a little let down by this book.

This is a very interesting premise wrapped in a thrilling and propulsive novel. While some of the “tech speak” was confusing and some threads were hard to follow, the plot kept the action moving forward. I liked the characters who were flawed, scared and real as well as the interpersonal dynamics.

This is an incredibly interesting concept for a book, which the synopsis does a great job of explaining, but it took me quite a long time to remember the idea behind "The Night Time is the Right Time" technology. At the beginning of the book we're thrown into the action, which is great for creating tension, but I think an overview of the technology near the very start of the book would be helpful for anchoring the reader. That said, I felt like a lot of the book went over my head and was overly tech-y and action-y which is not my favorite type of story.

⭐️: 2.5 / 5

Publication Date: December 5, 2023

I want to thank Enoviu Press and Net Galley for allowing me to get an eARC of this book in exchange for an honest review!

The first chapter leaves you wondering who the main character is and how they found themselves in a hotel room with 3 other people.

One of the coolest aspects of this story, is when the MC starts to piece together what’s going on to him. Some of the proposed technologies was interesting albeit not believable that it would occur in the next 10 years.

As for my reservations, brace yourselves. I found this to be a near future book more than Sci Fi, because of the fact that it would mention futuristic technology (contact lens screens) and mention Netflix in the next sentence which was jarring. Additionally, there were flashbacks sprinkled in that ruined the pacing of the main timeline.

Overall I wasn’t a big fan of this book. The pacing could’ve used a lot of work and towards the end felt it was getting more and more mellow dramatic. The ending felt unsatisfying and unfinished.

Would recommend for those who are fans of
- Near future sci fi
- Seattle setting
- Conspiracies

⚠️ drug abuse, domestic abuse

Thanks to #NetGalley for providing me a copy of the book in exchange for an hones review.
I liked the atmosphere of the book, it really did feel like 2033 and the future. It's a little hard to get into, the first couple of chapters have a lot of information at once. Most of the time I was skimming the pages just to get to the good stuff faster. Not bad but not great either.
Overall, I would recommend the book to people who are into sci-fi and mystery.