I had no idea what I was looking at for a long time, but I absolutely couldn’t stop reading. Standout achievements: Few books have ever piqued my interest and intrigued me the way Pines did. There are no unnecessary side-trips in Pines - Blake Crouch sticks to the point and makes sure the reader is fully invested at all times Blake Crouch understands the power of language and importance of pace. Worse, no one in Wayward Pines believes he is who he says he is - and that’s just the beginning of the strange events he’s about to experience But shortly after arriving, he’s met with a violent accident that leaves him in the hospital, where he comes to with no ID and none of his personal effects. The gist: Ethan Burke, a secret service agent, is sent to Wayward Pines, Idaho, to locate two agents who went missing there a month ago. Opening scene: A man wakes up in a strange town with no idea of who or where he is Most interesting characters: Ethan Burke, a secret service agent That’s the beautiful simplicity of evolution. As the book opens, Logan is exposed to something in a lab he's raiding, wakes up in a hospital, and suspects that he's been exposed to some sort of a gene-editing package that is about to change his body and his mind spectacularly.My favorite quote: “Nature doesn’t see things through the prism of good or bad. We come into this world where her son Logan is trying to make amends, and he works for the Gene Protection Agency, which was created as a reaction to what his mom did, to stamp out illegal gene editing.

The Gene Protection Act came in in the wake of the Great Starvation and essentially ended all gene-editing research, because people said, we can't ever have this happen again. Instead of fixing this one thing, she ends up plunging us into what came to be known as the Great Starvation. 'Twenty-some years prior to the events of the book, his mom, Miriam, who was a world-renowned geneticist, was in China with this wild gene-modifying tool she created, trying to edit this rice blight out of a crop. 'The protagonist is a guy named Logan Ramsey,' says Crouch, whose previous books include 2016's Dark Matter, and 2019's Recursion.

Pines by Blake Crouch