True, the lawyer who helps save our hero is a woman, and the vampy villainess finally loses out to…another woman, gray-haired and gruff. “This division is a mess,” the veteran tells her shell-shocked troops. “We’ve got a lot to do to turn this around.” (We’re giving away the plot, but believe us, there are no surprises to ruin.) And true, Crichton makes characters speechify about judging men and women equally. But none of this quite offsets the memorable effect of our hero’s boss in full cry: ““Oh! I’m so hot, I haven’t had a decent f–k-’ and then she threw herself back on him, kissing him again, her mouth mashed on him. Her tongue was in his mouth and he thought, Jesus, she’s pushing it. He smelled her perfume, and it immediately brought back memories.” Having salted his book with exculpatory egalitarianism, Crichton could beat the sexism rap on a technicality. But literary incorrectness? Let’s hear him talk his way out of that.
