Maybe it was because I'd just listened to King's Gunslinger series, but I found the writing to be amateur at best. If you're expecting a "can't stop listening" type of book, move on. If you just need to use this month's book club credit, it might be worth it - but don't expect much. I think this book might make a decent special effects movie but it was painful at times to listen to. Maybe with a better reader (he was very unimpressive)?

The overall premise of the book was excellent. The main character's actions and thoughts were very infuriating. At several times while reading this book I wanted to reach out and smack the main character in the back of the head. What action there was to the book seemed to be very typical. If I could make the decision again I most likely wouldn't read this book.

"Jack, it's eating me" So states the wife of Jack, the main character, when she is inhabited by a swarm of nanotech molecules who slowly take control of her mind and body. If you think this is some dialog from a cheesy science fiction from the 50's you would be wrong. It's from Michael Crichton's new novel "Prey".

Perhaps Crichton's reputation gets his works on the best seller lists. That, or American literary tastes have descended to new lows. "Prey" is a tedious waste of time.

A boring story line with amateur dialog about nanotech molecules attacking some Silicon Valley "scientists". Characters who are simply unbelieveable. After witnessing their fellow employees being butchered to death they calmly discusss the merits of frozen foods over dinner. And the "F" word is constantly over used and repeated ad nauseum by some of the characters. An occassional damn or sh*t would have been a relief.

Don't waste your time and money on this dog. I had to force myself to listen to the second half of it just to see how ludicrous he would get.

Crichton's main character aptly sums up this story......."It was so dumb it was breathtaking".

I enjoyed the book, but I agree with "Bring Your Hair Dryer". I can hear when the narrator swallows and it's just so annoying. I can't believe more people haven't commented on it. Instead of following the story, I found myself listening for the next swallow. Other than that, I found the story to be interesting, thrilling, and fast-paced.

you're not safe...

classic Crichton! i've always loved how he sews together science with science fiction, and Prey is another example in a long list of great Crichton books (along with Jurrasic Park, Sphere, Andromeda Strain, etc).

you can tell he did his homework on the technology behind this story.

he did an excellent job creating the different characters and he made it easy for me to keep them separated in my head. kudos to him.

i always have a tough time answering this question, as i've listened to several books since this one. but if you are a fan of Crichton, then this book will not let you down.

highly recommended, and since his (unfortunate) passing, i relish anything i can read/listen to by Crichton.

As others have already noted, the beginning, character and background development, was slow. But once the plot moved to the desert, the action started accelerating faster and faster. During the later fast action part, I didn't want to stop to eat/sleep. I really enjoyed the action acceleration to the climax, and then the slower ending...very nice effect IMHO, that I admire more so in retrospect.

This book is a great story. Like Jurassic park it truelly is a great story with a great plot. The idea of the new microsized technology is stunning and the story carries it well. The plot is exiting and just when you have figuret everything out, new aspects appear. This is truely high entertainment, but a few weekneses prevents this from getting top marks. The story is very long on the way. the first 40 pages and more a somewhat slow, but when the story speeds up, it is truely entertaining.

I must say that I really enjoyed this audio book. The reader is very, very good and I love the story. I always love that Crichton, like in timeline, really makes things like NANO technologies really easy to understand. If you live in the BAY AREA, you will like this book even more, because many of the places are familiar and especially the characters are very life like. Great book.

The narrator had about 5 slightly different voices that he used for different characters, and all of the voices were annoying. The main character always seemed to be sighing, his wife was really annoying, it was distracting. I am normaly a fan of Michael Crichton, I think this book would have been a lot better if I had read the print version. But, it was slightly entertaining, I managed to finish it. If this story seems interesting to you, buy it in print.

Unbelievable, poorly crafted story. We have to hear the author drone on about nano-tech for 5 minutes before we can hear the book. The story starts out okay, but then moves directly into unbelievable. The dumb protagonist suffers repeated damage in one day but continues to show no signs of harm. At the end of the story, the author assumes we are too dumb to have figured things out on our own and goes into boring explication. The narrator can't keep his voices straight, and the background noises of flipping pages (or something simiar) are really annoying.

I love action-adventure fiction, but this didn't cut it for me.