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Title: A strain? It's more of a stretch.
Review: I'm getting to the point where I'm starting to think I should just quit reading Crichton's books. "Prey" was OK; "State of Fear" was pretty dreadful. Thankfully, those and this book are the only ones I've read so far. I'm not even going to touch "Next," from what I've heard. I picked up this early book of his, hoping maybe it'd be different. But no -- it's the same old cardboard characters whose quirks are told to us rather than shown (did he never attend even one writing workshop?). The same old making science into an image that fits the plot, bending facts at will and just making some up (eg, having the guys swim open-eyed through some mysterious disinfectant, like that's going to get all the bacteria...). The same old blunt-force foreshadowing. The same old lecturing and moralizing. Ugh. The one saving grace was that it was a fast read.
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