I'm DNFing this. The basic idea here is decent enough, but the execution is somewhat lacking. Pines comes across as an outline or skeleton draft of a weightier piece, where someone would come back through later on and flesh it out with subsequent drafts. 
 I'm not sure which came first, this book or the movie deal, but either way it just kind of feels like the book series was always somewhat of an afterthought, as if Crouch had decided to make a novelization of a script. I kind of hope that this is the case, because otherwise I can't entirely see what it is about this book that was so captivating that it would inspire a TV series. It's decent but it's the type of book that you know could have been done so much better. There are multiple places where I'm told that something should be tense and exciting, but I don't really *feel* these emotions. 
 However that said, this probably will work far, far better as a television series than it did a book. I just can't help but shake the feeling that this book was mostly an afterthought, something written as a marketing tie-in for the series and based off a pre-existing script. Now in all fairness, this might not have been Crouch's decision as he may have given Fox the script and been instructed to write a book trilogy. It's not uncommon for authors to be given a very, very specific set of instructions for TV/movie novelizations, meaning that they can only have a set page count and cannot go but so far from the script they were given- sometimes even when they were the script's original writer. This just felt like it deserved better.