Micro

Micro is a techno-thriller published in 2011. Michael Crichton left an untitled and unfinished manuscript when he died in 2008, and the science writer Richard Preston completed the novel from his notes and research.

The book opens with a private investigator called Marcos Rodriguez visiting the headquarters of Nanigen Micro-Technologies on Oahu disguised as a security guard. He finds nothing obviously incriminating, begins to notice fine cuts appearing on his skin for no visible reason, and leaves in a hurry. The company's reaction is not to explain anything, and the deaths in the locked office follow. Meanwhile seven graduate students at the top of their fields in Cambridge, Massachusetts, are recruited by the same company for what looks like a remarkable opportunity and flown to a remote laboratory in Hawaii, where the work turns out to involve dimensions that make escape difficult and ordinary hazards fatal.

Crichton's later novels mix scientific research with corporate greed, and this one draws its danger from the smallest end of biology, with a Pacific island supplying a wilderness the characters are not equipped to survive.