The Andromeda Strain is one of my favorite books (and movie!) but I've never read anything else Crichton has ever written until now. I'm not sure what I was expecting, but I was a little baffled by the plot. It seems like the author got halfway into writing the book and ran out of plot. I thought it was excessively wordy and I flipped through many pages because I just wasn't interested in the psychobabble. Overall a very suspenseful read, a real page turner and I enjoyed it, for the most part. Note: my copy was 498 pages long, about 200 pages more than goodreads listed.