Ethan Burke is a Secret Service agent sent to Wayward Pines, Idaho, to find two missing federal agents. He crashes his car outside town and wakes up in a hospital with no wallet, no phone, and no way to contact the outside world. The town looks like a postcard of small-town America. Friendly neighbors. Clean streets. A sheriff who smiles too much.
Nothing works the way it should. Phone calls don’t go through. There’s no cell service. The roads out of town loop back to the town. An electrified fence surrounds the perimeter. When Ethan finds one of the missing agents dead in an abandoned house, the sheriff tells him not to worry about it. The townspeople tell him to stop asking questions. And every Thursday night, the whole town gathers for a “fete” that Ethan doesn’t understand until it’s too late.
Blake Crouch structured the first novel as a mystery box. The question driving everything is simple: what is Wayward Pines? The answer, revealed at the end of Pines, changes the nature of the story entirely. The second and third books deal with the consequences of that revelation and force Ethan to make decisions about the future of everyone in town.
Ethan is a flawed protagonist. He has PTSD from a previous mission. His marriage is strained. He’s not a straightforward hero. Crouch used those flaws to make the story more complex. Ethan doesn’t just have to figure out Wayward Pines. He has to figure out what he’s willing to do about it.
Reading Order
See the complete Wayward Pines reading order for all books featuring Ethan Burke.