Pines

Pines is a thriller by the American writer Blake Crouch, published in 2012 and the first book of the Wayward Pines sequence.

Ethan Burke is a Secret Service agent who comes to Wayward Pines, a small town in Idaho, with a clear task: find two federal agents who vanished there a month earlier. Before he has done anything he is involved in a collision, and he wakes up in the town's hospital without his identification, his telephone or his briefcase, in the care of people who are friendly in a way that does not hold up to any questions. The novel follows his attempt to work out where his colleagues went and why the town seems arranged to keep him from leaving, and the longer he stays the more the ordinary details of the place refuse to add up. Crouch writes the book as a mystery that turns into something quite different, and it was the first of three novels about the same town, published within the next two years.