Final release for A-list author

MICRO By Michael Crichton and Richard Preston (Harpercollins, RRP $40) Reviewed by Jillian Allison-aitken

Michael Crichton died in November 2008, but that hasn’t stopped two more novels appearing under his name.

He had a talent for story-telling in words and in pictures, as shown by his many successful novels, movies (including The Andromeda Strain and Jurassic Park, which were successes in both categories) and as creator and executive producer of long-running medical drama ER.

Crichton has sold more than 150 million books in 36 languages and is the only writer to have had the No 1 book, movie, and TV show at the same time.

While the author’s passing was an untimely shock, two new novels were found on his computer after his death: the completed Pirate Latitudes, published in 2009, and the unfinished Micro.

Richard Preston ( The Cobra Event, The Hot Zone) took on the job of finishing Micro, and the result is a an uncomfortably realistic techno-thriller.

Ground-breaking new technology has opened the way for a new era in bio-prospecting, with advances in micro robotics giving scientists unbelievable resources and leading to the discovery of tens of thousands of species of bacteria.

In a locked Honolulu office building, three men are found dead with ultra-fine, razor-sharp cuts to their body and a tiny bladed robot is the only clue.

Meanwhile, seven graduate students in Massachusetts are recruited by a pioneering microbiology company. The students are sent to a laboratory in Hawaii where they are promised the opportunity to open a whole new scientific frontier, but when in the Oahu rain forest they realise things are not as promised: they become prey to a technology unlike any they have seen before.

Nanigen is the company that makes the micro-robots and company head Vin Drake has secrets he doesn’t want shared.

The dastardly Drake shrinks the seven young scientists to one centimetre tall and they have to fight their way through a remote rainforest in Hawaii.

I realise the plot probably doesn’t sound entirely original, but it is a fast-paced read that is packed with drama.