I dove into Michael Crichton’s next book, The Venom Business, as I work through his bibliography. This one took me a while to actually get into. There’s a bit of a convoluted plot for the first half of the book inundated with the parties and happenings of a swinging London where everyone, apparently, is over-sexed, and occasionally very sexist and homophobic.

The story centers around Charles Raynaud, a smuggler who lives and works in Mexico. When he’s not smuggling he’s transporting snakes of all varieties to universities and labs for study. He meets and has a quick thing with Jane Mitchell before heading to Paris.

It’s in Paris that things start to get twisted up. Charles bumps into an ‘old friend,’ the snotty, sexist rich prig of a man named Richard Pierce, who wants to hire Charles as a bodyguard, as he believes his stepmother, Lucienne, wants him dead. When they move to London, Charles meets Lucienne who wants to hire him to keep Charles alive.

And Charles begins to suspect that there’s something bigger going on here, some sort of scandal that will have a direct impact on Richard’s business finances, the estate he’s going to come into, and Lucienne’s desire to live in a manner she’s accustomed.

Throw in some murder attempts, and lots of female characters that are merely there for titillation and male gratification, and you have my least favourite of Crichton’s novels to date. I will say, that once the second half of the book kicked in, and Charles started being a little more pro-active, it ended up being more enjoyable.

This is perhaps the most pulpy of Crichton’s tales so far, written, once again, under his John Lange nom de plume. It’s all sex and violence, flashy cars, short skirts, and a mad scientist thrown in for good measure. The twisty plot attempts to elevate it above the basic fare of the genre, something Crichton is usually good at, but this one just didn’t work for me.

I liked the fact that everyone was lying to everyone else, and it was up to the reader to keep it all straight until it all gets laid out, but it wasn’t as enjoyable as a romp as some of Crichton’s other early work.

Still, it’s not terrible, it’s just not my favourite to date. We’ll see how I feel about the next one, when I dig into it, Micheal Crichton delivers another novel as John Lange, Drug of Choice.