Jack, a middle-aged househusband, thinks his wife Julia is having an affair. She’s behaving oddly: dressing sexier, acting testy, taking showers at night…that is, on the nights she comes home. Although Jack cares for their baby and two older children, Julia shows resentment that he’s not doing anything after getting fired from his job over a political scandal that pegged Jack as the scapegoat. Just when Jack needs his wife most, she seems absorbed in her career and a ploy to gain custody of their children. But since this is Crichton, you can assume his newest novel Prey is no Mr. Mom re-make.

Knowing it’s Crichton, you can also expect underdeveloped characters and relationships coupled with fantastic suspense and science fiction. It isn’t a man making Julia crazy and driving her family apart, but an escaped cloud of nanoparticles. Designed by the company Julia represents, these microrobots were genetically engineered to harmlessly enter a human body to take real time video footage of the working anatomy. Unfortunately, a swarm of these nanoparticles have gotten out of the lab and are loose in the Nevada desert. An experiment gone wrong, the swarm is reproducing and gaining intelligence through experience. Modeled after biological predator processes and evolving quickly, it is looking for prey.

As frustrating as this book is, you can’t put it down. The protagonist Jack is unrealistic. He creates wildly intelligent solutions to escaping the swarm, but he constantly misses the obvious. Jack is like that girl running in the woods that you scream at in B-horror movies. As a wife myself, Jack’s disregard for Julia’s well-being is as terrifying as the nanoparticles. Jack’s whole personality wavers. One minute Jack’s a caring Dad, and the next minute he barely blinks when Julia bitch-slaps his baby. He’s just like, “Wow, Julia sure is acting weird. She’s getting on my nerves—ha, ha.” Then there are the times when Jack completely breaks character, and you know it’s Michael talking, but these distractions for the author to soapbox evolution and technology are such nuggets, you don’t care. Some of the suspense scenes feel a little too familiar—like the gang is trapped in a car and they see the eye of t-rex…oops, wrong book…I mean, menacing nanoswarm.

But Crichton’s mix of real technology—genetics, nanotechnology, and distributed intelligence—with the fictitious is so fascinating, I read this novel in one sitting. Still the master of suspense, Crichton knows how to get under my skin in more ways than one.