Enjoying an active but lonely rural life, seventy-year-old Percy allows a progressive preschool to move into his barn and transform his quiet home into a lively, youthful community that compels him to reexamine the choices he made after his wife's death.

Hiaasen at his riotous and muckraking best. When eco-enthusiast Twilly Spree spots someone in a Range Rover dumping litter onto the freeway, he decides to teach him a lesson - only to discover that his target is Palmer Stoat, one of Florida's cockiest and most powerful political fixers, whose current project just happens to be the 'malling' of a Gulf Coast Island... A quick spot of dognapping later and the pathologically short-tempered Twilly finds...

Later, my conscience would play the inevitable game of "What if . . ." What if I had stopped by Jobe's home on Friday morning instead of Sunday night? What if I hadn't interrupted the two people who were alternately interrogating and beating him? Would he have lived? Or would he have died? And what would have happened then? It started when Doc Ford got a call from his old friend Frieda Matthews; her reclusive biologist brother, Jobe, wasn't answering...

Once again Michael Crichton gives us his trademark combination of page-turning suspense, cutting-edge technology, and extraordinary research. State of Fear is a superb blend of edge-of-your-seat suspense and thought provoking commentary on how information is manipulated in the modern world. From the streets of Paris, to the glaciers of Antarctica to the exotic and dangerous Solomon Islands, State of Fear takes the reader on a roller coaster thrill...