Tadiana ✩Night Owl☽'s Reviews > Pines

First book in a trilogy. Pretty good SF thriller! Review first posted on Fantasy Literature:

Apparently I’ve been living under a rock or, perhaps, in an isolated cottage in a pine forest, since I had never heard of Wayward Pines — the town, the trilogy of novels by Blake Crouch, or the Fox TV series based on these novels — before I picked up Pines. In this case, being oblivious was a great thing, since the mystery wasn’t spoiled. I think it would be possible to enjoy reading Pines already knowing what the big secret is, but certainly not knowing was a major reason I found it so compelling.

A man regains consciousness by the side of a road in a small town, bruised and battered after an apparent car crash, and with temporary amnesia about most of the details of his life, and no ID on his person. He meets a few of the residents in town, who seem oddly withdrawn and wary. He winds up in the local hospital but feels leery of his treatment there. But with no ID, no cell phone, and little memory, his options are limited.

Fairly soon, Ethan remembers that he’s a Secret Service agent, and that he was heading to the town of Wayward Pines, Idaho to investigate the disappearance of two other federal agents, one of whom was his former partner and lover, Kate. Wayward Pines looks like a cozy, picturesque town, with its charming Victorian-style houses and high rock cliffs surrounding the town. But Ethan starts to realize how much he’s getting the runaround from … pretty much everyone in town. The hospital staff, the local sheriff, the people he talks to on the telephone (when the telephones even work): everything is just OFF, and people are acting strangely around him.

There are so many questions in Ethan’s (and the reader’s) mind: Why is everyone acting so oddly? Why can’t he find his way out of town? Why can’t he reach anyone on the phone — including his boss and wife — that he knows?

Pines is a bewildering book (until the secrets start being revealed and All Is Explained), but it’s bewildering in a good way. It’s full to the brim and spilling over with tension and a lurking sense of danger and horror that becomes more and more tangible, as the novel picks up its pace steadily until the adrenaline-driven conclusion. I did have a couple of theories about what was going on; one was totally wrong and the other was, well, not quite right, but at least on the pathway to being right. I ended up rereading the final chapters a couple of times because the final answer was so very fascinating to me.

Pines loses a star in my rating because, after all the excitement of reading it was over, the explanation of what was going on in the town of Wayward Pines didn’t entirely hold water for me. Several of the events that took place struck me, in the cold light of morning, as unrealistic and illogical, elements that were added just to make the plot more exciting and Ethan’s life more stressful and dangerous.

My recommendation is that you turn off the critical functions of your brain and go along for the ride. Pines is an intense, gripping novel that was completely impossible for me to put down. I was in the library the very next day, checking out the two remaining books in this WAYWARD PINES series.