Zero Cool

By: Michael Crichton, John Lange

Narrated by: Christopher Lane

Length: 5 hrs and 40 mins

Publisher's summary

American radiologist Peter Ross just wanted a vacation. But when he meets the beautiful Angela Locke on a Spanish beach, he soon finds himself caught in a murderous crossfire between rival gangs seeking a precious artifact.

From Barcelona to the rain-swept streets of Paris, from the towers of the Alhambra to its darkest catacombs, Peter Ross is an ordinary man in desperate circumstances: racing to uncover a secret lost for centuries, before he becomes its next victim.

©1969 Constant c Productions, Inc.; Copyright renewed 2005 by CrichtonSun LLC. “John Lange” and “Zero Cool” are trademarks of CrichtonSun LLC, used under license (P)2015 Brilliance Audio, all rights reserved

Story was okay but performance grated.

One of the early Crichton novels, and was good enough until the last few chapters which were a bit less thrilling. All in all, a fair enough effort.

What really annoyed me was the reader’s mashup accents- in particular the ‘professor’ who variously sounded like an east ender and an Oxford don...Bertie Wooster mixed with Michael Caine.

Great story!

I LOVED the narrator! The story gets a little slow towards the end, and the characters are a bit eccentric, but this was a wonderfully entertaining tale!

Good Story and Narration

It was a very good story and well narrated but it has an odd beginning.

Not bad...good twist and turns

Not bad...good twist and turns. The narration was good and story was just ok. Good for a book that was written in what I guess was the 70's.

Like bad Peter Lorrie 40s B flick

No cliche left un-squirmed. Ugh! Like a pot boiler stew crammed with over seasoned veggies past their buy time.

Dime store caper

Cue the saxophone, smarmy bad guys, and femme fatale.
This was an entertaining, if rather basic, caper suitable for public television.

Hope there's a movie somewhere day!

Loved the story, the humor, the excitement and the description of the Alhambra made me want to go there!

but the DVD?

The late 60s didnt have DVD...how can this be a camcorder with DVD discs? Very troublesome bit the bothers me beyond the entire story being good.

Great book with odd beginning

I love Michael Crichton and was a bit wary buying this book - after all, this book was written in the late 60's before he really started to develop his writing style / career. After the first hour I almost stopped because the plot was just too strange, but I was on a long training run and didn't have anything else to listen to. After the second hour it got really good and it was hard to stop. I'd recommend this book but there is something fishy (to me) about the claim that it was written in 1968. At the end of the book one of the characters mentions "taking the DVD out of the video recorder and placing it on the desk". Although I was born in 1970, I know for a fact that neither CD Roms of DVD's existed back then - so someone has done some additional writing / editing of Michael Crichton's original work.

Vintage caper story

This is an early work by Michael Crighton written under his pseudonym John Lange. It’s an old-school pop style adventure story. Almost to shaggy dog story but very enjoyable. The pacing is brisk all the characters are somewhat cartoonish. But it works, it’s fun and you might get some elements of it but you probably won’t guess everything. This is one of his better early works.