Your Guide to Michael Crichton Books

Written shortly after Crichton completed his medical internship, A Case of Need depicts the ever-building pressure and pace of a large Boston medical center. Tensions flare — and explode — when a surgical operation tragically ends in death, raising countless questions. Was it accidental malpractice? A violation of the Hippocratic oath? Or cold-blooded murder?

In an Arizona desert, a man wanders in a daze, speaking words that make no sense. Within twenty-four hours he is dead, his body swiftly cremated by his only known associates. Halfway around the world, archaeologists make a shocking discovery at a medieval site. Suddenly they are swept off to the headquarters of a secretive multinational corporation that has developed an astounding technology. Now this group is about to get a chance not to study the past, but to enter it. And with history opened to the present, the dead awakened to the living, these men and women will soon find themselves fighting for their very survival — six hundred years ago …

Three passengers are dead. Fifty-six are injured. The interior cabin is virtually destroyed. But the pilot manages to land the plane … At a moment when the issue of safety and death in the skies is paramount in the public mind, a lethal midair disaster aboard a commercial twin-jet airliner flying from Hong Kong to Denver triggers a pressured and frantic investigation. Airframe is an extraordinary thriller about airline safety, business intrigue, and a deadly cover-up.

In the middle of the South Pacific, a thousand feet below the surface, a huge vessel is unearthed. Rushed to the scene is a team of American scientists who descend together into the depths to investigate the astonishing discovery. What they find defies their imaginations and mocks their attempts at logical explanation. It is a spaceship, but apparently it is undamaged by its fall from the sky. And, most startling, it appears to be at least three hundred years old, containing a terrifying and destructive force that must be controlled at all costs.

Deep in the African rainforest, near the ruins of the Lost City of Zinj, a field expedition is brutally killed. At the Houston-based Earth Resources Technology Services, Inc., a horrified supervisor watches a gruesome video transmission of that ill-fated group and sees a haunting, grainy, man-like blur moving amongst the bodies. In San Francisco, an extraordinary gorilla named Amy, who has a 620-sign vocabulary, may hold the secret to that fierce carnage. Immediately, a new expedition is sent to the Congo with Amy in tow, descending into a secret, forbidden world where the only escape may be through the grisliest death.

On the forty-fifth floor of the Nakamoto tower in downtown Los Angeles — the new American headquarters of the immense Japanese conglomerate — a grand opening is in full swing. On the forty-sixth floor, in an empty conference room, the corpse of a beautiful young woman is discovered. The investigation immediately becomes a headlong chase through a twisting maze of industrial intrigue, a no-holds-barred conflict in which control of a vital American technology is the fiercely coveted prize — and in which the Japanese saying “Business is war” takes on a terrifying reality.

It is now six years since the secret disaster at Jurassic Park, six years since the extraordinary dream of science and imagination came to a crashing end — the dinosaurs destroyed, the park dismantled, and the island indefinitely closed to the public. But there are rumors that something has survived …

An up-and-coming executive at the computer firm DigiCom, Tom Sanders is a man whose corporate future is certain. But after a closed-door meeting with his new boss — a woman who is his former lover and has been promoted to the position he expected to have — Sanders finds himself caught in a nightmarish web of deceit in which he is branded the villain. As Sanders scrambles to defend himself, he uncovers an electronic trail into the company’s secrets — and begins to grasp that a cynical and manipulative scheme has been devised to bring him down.

Fueled by a powerful curiosity — and by a need to see, feel, and hear, firsthand and close-up — Michael Crichton’s journeys have carried him into worlds diverse and compelling — swimming with mud sharks in Tahiti, tracking wild animals through the jungle of Rwanda. This is a record of those travels — an exhilarating quest across the familiar and exotic frontiers of the outer world, a determined odyssey into the unfathomable, spiritual depths of the inner world. It is an adventure of risk and rejuvenation, terror and wonder, as exciting as Michael Crichton’s many masterful and widely heralded works of fiction.

London, 1855, when lavish wealth and appalling poverty exist side by side, one mysterious man navigates both worlds with perfect ease. Edward Pierce preys on the most prominent of the well-to-do as he cunningly orchestrates the crime of his century. Based on fact, but studded with all the suspense and style of fiction, here is a classic historical thriller, set a decade before the age of dynamite — yet nonetheless explosive …

Harry Benson suffers from violent seizures. So violent that he often blackouts when they take hold. Shortly after severely beating two men during an episode, the police escort Benson to a Los Angeles hospital for an experimental procedure that would place electrodes deep in his brain’s pleasure centers, effectively short-circuiting Harry’s seizures with pulses of bliss. The surgery is successful, but while Benson is in recovery, he discovers how to trigger the pulses himself. To make matters worse his violent impulses have only grown, and he soon escapes the hospital with a deadly agenda …

The novel that redefined the science fiction genre, starring a team of scientists who must uncover what killed the citizens of a sleepy desert town — and stop the deadly contagion before it creates a catastrophe.

It is 922 A.D. The refined Arab courtier Ibn Fadlan is accompanying a party of Viking warriors back to the north. Fadlan belatedly discovers that his job is to combat the terrors in the night that come to slaughter the Vikings — but just how he will do it, Fadlan has no idea …