One of Crichton's early works - his fifth, apparently - is an enjoyable thriller about a doctor who heads off to Spain for a holiday and to present a paper at a conference and finds himself involved in intrigue: he's asked to do an autopsy, meets a beautiful girl and has people trying to kill him.
This is fun - it gets off to a flying start and is written with pace and energy. It doesn't have the research that marked Crichton's great works - which is a shame because when it deals with stuff he knows (eg performing an autopsy) it's good. The bulk of it is a bit derivative - the macguffin is an emerald like the Maltese Falcon, the head villain is a drawf - and some of it feels stock ("they're dead!" "no, they're not - twist!").
But there's plenty of pace and I loved the device of the falcon trained to kill people who smelled a certain way. This worked well in books.
Crichton added a beginning and end chapter for a reissue of the book - about the doctor remembering the adventure. There wasn't really a point to it - unless they'd referred to the fate of other characters which he doesn't.
No comments:
Post a Comment