If you're not familiar, Crichton is the author of, among others, Jurassic Park, Sphere, Congo, The Andromeda Strain, and, one of my favorites, Eaters of the Dead, all good books and worth a read, although Eaters of the Dead was the only one with a truly worthy film adaptation, titled The 13th Warrior; Jurassic Park was a great movie, but very different from the book. Congo is an OK movie if you take it at face value, but the book is amazing and needs to be treated as an unrelated entity from the movie. Sphere? I dunno, the book was interesting, but a bit shaky, and does anyone actually like Sharon Stone?
In a nutshell this was a great book. Set in the mid 1600's, it's a fairly factual telling of a fictional pirate raid, dwelling heavily on the customs and technology of the day. An English privateer puts a small crew together to raid a Spanish outpost, then has to escape with his undermanned Galleon and fight off reprisals; true to Crichton's formula he manages to mix the fantastic with the mundane, even pitting them against a sea monster for a short period. Story finishes up with betrayal and revenge, true to pirate folklore. It ends like his other books too, another reason I liked his writing style, he wraps everything up, but you understand that life still flows on, it's just this little microcosm that has come to a conclusion.
This is going to be the last Michael Crichton novel published, it was found on his computer after his death and published posthumously; a second book was also found, but being that it was half finished there will be a co-author involved to get it published. I haven't spoken a great deal about the story itself, I think I often give too much away on these things and books should be experienced, not just read. Go, get a copy, paper, electronic, or even audio, and check it out, it's well worth the time spent.
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