Here are the dust-cover descriptions of books I have read by Michael Crichton.
A Case of Need
Was it murder? Was it horribly botched surgery -- accidental malpractice?
Was someone in the great Boston medical center violating the Hippocratic
oath? No one knows exactly.... Only one doctor is willing to push his way
through the mysterious maze of hidden medical data and shocking secrets to
learn the truth.
Airframe
Three passengers are dead. Fifty-six are injured. The interior cabin
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 bound from Hong Kong to Denver triggers a pressered and frantic
investigation.
The Terminal Man
Harry Benson suffers from violent seizures. So violent that he requires a
police guard when entering a Los Angeles hospital for treatment.
Dr. Roger Mcpherson, head of the prestigious Neuropsychiatric Research Unit,
is convinced he can cure benson through a procedure known as a stage three.
During this highly specialized surgery, electrodes, placed deep in Benson's
brain, send monitored soothing pulses to its pleasure canyons.
The operation is a success -- untill benson discovers how to get the pulses
with increasing frequency. Then he escapes from the hospital and lapses
into murderous rampages, becoming a homicidal maniac with a deadly agenda....
Sphere
In the middle of the South Pacific, a thousand feet below the surface of the
water, a huge vessel is discovered resting on the ocean floor.
Rushed to the scene is a group of American scientists who descend together
into the depths of the sea to investigate this astonishing discovery.
What they find defies their imaginations and mocks their attempts at logical
explanation. It is a spaceship of phenomenal dimensions, apparently
undamaged by its fall from the sky. And, most startling, it appears to be
at least three hundred years old....
Congo
Deep in the heart of the darkest region of the congo, near the legendary
ruins of the Lost City of Zinj, and eight-person field expedition dies
mysteriously and brutally in a matter of minutes.
Ten thousand miles away, at the Houston-based Earth Resources Technology
Services, Inc., supervisor Karen Ross watches a gruesome video transmission
of that ill-fated team: a camp destroyed, tents crushed and torn, equipment
scattered in the mud alongside the bodies...and the grainy, moving image of
a dark, blurred shape.
In San Francisco, primatologist Peter Elliot works with Amy, an extraordinary
gorilla with a 620 "sign" vocabulary and a fondness for finger painting. Her
recent drawing matches, with stunning accuracy, the frayed, brittle edges of
a Portuguese print dating back to 1642...a drawing of the ancient lost city.
Immediately, a new expedition is sent into the Congo, descending into a
secret world where the only way out may be through the grisliest death....
Jurassic Park
An astonishing technique for recovering and cloning dinosaur DNA has been
discovered. Now, on of mankind's most thrilling fantasies has come true.
Creatures extinct for eons now roam Jurassic Park with their awesome presence
and profound mystery, and all the world can visit them -- for a price.
Until something goes wrong....
Disclosure
An up-and-coming executive at the computer firm DigiCom, Tom Sanders is a man
whose corporate future is certaion. 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....
Andromeda Strain
Rising Sun
On the forty-fifth floor of the Nakamoto Tower in downtown L.A. --- the new
American headquarters of the immense Japanese conglomerate --- a grand
opening celebration is in full swing.
On the forty-sizth floor, in an empty conference room, the dead body of a
beautiful young woman is discovered.
The investigation begins... and 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 the Japanese saying "business is war" takes on a terrifying reality....
Timeline
In an Arizona desert a man wanders in a daze,
speaking works 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....
Eaters of the Dead (later published as The 13th Warrior)
In the year A.D. 922, a refined Arab courtier,
representative of the powerful Caliph of Bagdad,
encounters a party of Viking warriors on their journey to
the barbaric North. He is appalled by Viking customs ---
the wanton sexuality of their pale, angular women,
their disregard for cleanliness, their cold-blooded human
sacrifices. But only in the depths of the Northland
does he learn the horrifying truth: He has been enlisted
to combat a terror that comes under cover of night to
slaughter the Vikings and devour their flesh....
The Great Train Robbery
In teeming Victorian London, where lavish wealth and
appalling poverty live side by side, one mysterious man
navigates both worlds with perfect ease. Rich,
handsome, and ingenious, Edward Pierce charms the
most prominent of the well-to-do as he cunningly
orchestrates the crime of his century.
Who would suspect that a gentleman of breeding could
mastermind the daring theft of a fortune in gold? Who
could predict the consequences of committing the
extraordinary robbery aboard the pride of England's
industrial era, the mighty steam locomotive? Based on
fact, as lively as legend, and studded with all the
suspense and style of Michael Crichton at his best, here
is a classic caper novel set a decade before the age of
dynamite --- yet explosive nonetheless....