And this time I mean it.
Reading State of fear was disillusioning. I somehow did not want to believe the Crichton I had enjoyed for all those years could churn out something as, uh, shitty.
I remember the day I read and loved Airframe. I had been out of authors for a while having exhausted McLean, Ludlum, Sheldon, Forsyth, Rand, Dahl, Follet, Greene, L' Amour. I remember going to Crossroads (in Mumbai) and buying all of his novels and finishing off the bunch in 1 week. Disclosure, Jurassic Park, The Great Train Robbery I liked most of them. Then I read his non-fictional Travels and was disappointed. Then came Prey and I started questioning wisdom behind buying his novel. State of Fear confirmed it. And I had decided.
And then I impulsively bought a hardbound of NEXT in Costco for $9.99.
Disappointing is not the word. The book has a series of short stories which kinda come together, weakly, at the end. Too many characters, too many scenes, over information. Crichton seems to take pride in talking technical (something like Clancy) and ends up sounding like a broken record and a badly written user manual.
Stay away from it. And I wish he had called it LAST.