Disclosure

Disclosure is a novel by the American writer Michael Crichton, published in 1994, his ninth book under his own name and nineteenth in total. It is set at a fictional computer hardware manufacturing company.

Tom Sanders works at DigiCom and has been expecting to take charge of the advanced products division once the company's merger with a publishing house goes through. The position is given to Meredith Johnson, a woman he was once involved with, who has recently arrived in Seattle from the company's offices in Cupertino, California. That day she calls him into her office to discuss an advanced CD-ROM drive and tries to restart their relationship, and when he refuses she tells him she will make him pay for it. The next morning he finds that she has accused him of sexual harassment, and the rest of the novel follows his attempt to prove what really happened in a room that had no other witnesses in it.

Crichton's novels are usually built on a piece of technology or a professional world that he explains in detail, and this one applies that method to a corporate dispute in which the evidence is a matter of who is believed rather than what can be measured. The account of the meeting is given to the reader directly, and the tension comes from watching an organisation work out what to do with it.