Wayward: Wayward Pines 2

This one was even better than the first. I wish it wasn't so late, or I would dive right into The Last Town! I still might! Yep! I think I'm going to keep going! Six stars, if it were possible.

Excellent early stuff by the scientist writer of terror. Need to read the third book now. That's all you need to know.

What another great book by Blake Crouch…soooo good Loved dark matter and the trilogy is great. I need to get more of his work

Great packaging

Only two weeks after Ethan Burke has learned from David Pilcher, the self-professed genius behind the little enclosed town of Wayward Pines, the true story of the origin of the town and the reason for it, he is confronted with the suicide of a newly awakened resident of the town and what appears to be a shocking murder. As the new sheriff, Ethan has been requested to talk the suicide out of it, but he fails and the man runs to the electrified fence and electrocutes himself. He does not receive any advance warning about the murder; he just runs over her with his Bronco on the way back from the suicide site.In this book, we get an even closer look at how creepily closely Pilcher tries to control everything that happens in Wayward Pines. And we get some unsettling flashbacks of the time when the project was being set up that explain certain things. But not everything.I didn’t understand in the first book why the real meaning and significance of the town and why no one was allowed to leave was kept from its residents. In this book, keeping people in the dark becomes even more problematic. There is a relatively large contingent of people responsible for the background maintenance of the town who know many of the reasons for all the secrecy, and who have jobs vital to the functioning of the town. But the everyday residents are treated as if they are not much more than toy figures populating a toy village. They also have token jobs that make it appear that they are part of a functioning town, but the vast majority of these are mostly window-dressing. They rarely if ever get to do anything actually useful. If all the people of the town had known what was really going on, and if they had been allowed to use their skills to solve the problems the town had begun to encounter, they might have been able to overcome the forces working to destroy the town.Ethan Burke, in his new job as sheriff, is sort of halfway between these two extremes. He is now considered part of the vital maintenance of the town and meets periodically with Pilcher inside his secret mountain fortress, but he is not, at least not yet, part of the insider group.In his investigation of the murder, Ethan meets Ted, head of the surveillance group, who seems to suspect some of the wrongness going on, and who is very helpful in tracking down at least part of what really happened.Pilcher and his right-hand woman Pam, the psycho nurse from the first book of the series, suggest that Kate Hewson, Ethan’s former partner at the Secret Service in his past life, and her Wayward Pines husband are responsible for the murder of the girl who turns out to be Pilcher’s daughter. Ethan finds something different. But a fête is declared. Instead of the usual execution, Ethan explains to the population of the town just why it is that they can never return to the places or lives they had before.In retaliation, David Pilcher declares himself to be a god. And just like that, when they thought things might be getting better, everything is suddenly much, much worse.