I’ve been reading a lot of books by Blake Crouch, some I liked more than others. Pines is the first of the “Wayward Pines” trilogy, a series of books inspired by the television series “Twin Peaks”, as the author admits in an afterword. The books have apparently resulted in a television series which got very mixed reviews, from what I can tell. I enjoyed much of this book, but the second half — not so much. There’s a lot of unnecessary violence, there are creatures that seem to serve no purpose other than to give an excuse to more violence, and pretty much all the characters except for the main one and his immediate family are unlikeable. Following the big reveal near the end of this volume, I don’t plan to read the other two books in the series. I don’t see the point.