I was looking for something other than Stephen King to listen to as my in-the-car audio book, and I came across this: the last book by Michael Crichton. I thought this would tell me if the rest of his work would be worth checking out, but as it turns out, it was finished by Richard Preston, and a lot of the problems I had with this story was the writing style.
First off, this sounds like the first story of a writer with potential: an interesting idea that the writer didn't know how to put into words. This has a lot of words being repeated in the same sentence and it just sounded odd. All in all, it reads more like a movie script someone barely put effort into converting into a novel.
This is a shame, because the actual story is a good idea: take the incredible shrinking man trope, add in some bits of reality ensues, and then throw them in an area with the most dangerous insects known to man.
It starts out promising, with some detective being killed by miniature machines, but it quickly becomes banal when we are introduced to our heroes. They're pretty much cardboard cut-out archetypes, with no real development. There's a romance that comes out of nowhere, and they're killed off so frequently I couldn't care about them. Also, screw that Danny Minot character. I don't know if it was Crichton or Preston, but inserting a character just to mock sciences you don't like is childish.
I think I might have liked this if it were a movie, where the visuals could make up for it. As a book, however, I'd say pass it.