Congo

　　為了探尋鑽石礦脈及調查一次神祕死亡事件，羅絲博士帶領一支冒險隊深入非洲內陸的剛果盆地，隨行的還有一隻懂手語的猩猩......

　　這支帶著高科技配備的探險隊除了要克服險惡的地理環境障礙、逃避食人族的捕獵之外，還要對付同為鑽石而來的競爭者。但真正使人膽戰心驚的卻是一連串的神秘死亡事件，究竟他們面對的是什麼樣的敵人？

　　本書是麥克．克萊頓於《侏羅紀公園》之外，另一部以人類與生物界的衝突為題材的小說，內容緊張刺激而不失幽默，使人讀來妙趣無窮！

　　Deep in the African rain forest, near the legendary ruins of the Lost City of Zinj, an expedition of eight American geologists are mysteriously and brutally killed in a matter of minutes.

　　Ten thousand miles away, Karen Ross, the Congo Project Supervisor, watches a gruesome video transmission of the aftermath: a camp destroyed, tents crushed and torn, equipment scattered in the mud alongside dead bodies—all motionless except for one moving image—a grainy, dark, man-shaped blur.

　　In San Francisco, primatologist Peter Elliot works with Amy, a gorilla with an extraordinary vocabulary of 620 "signs," the most ever learned by a primate, and she likes to finger paint. But recently her behavior has been erratic and her drawings match, with stunning accuracy, the brittle pages of a Portuguese print dating back to 1642 . . . a drawing of an ancient lost city. A new expedition—along with Amy—is sent into the Congo, where they enter a secret world, and the only way out may be through a horrifying death . . .

作者簡介

　　Michael Crichton, who died in Los Angeles on November 4, 2008, was a writer and filmmaker, best known as the author of Jurassic Park and the creator of ER. His most recent novel, Next, about genetics and law, was published in December 2006.

　　Crichton graduated summa cum laude from Harvard College, received his MD from Harvard Medical School, and was a postdoctoral fellow at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies, researching public policy with Jacob Bronowski. He taught courses in anthropology at Cambridge University and writing at MIT. Crichton’s 2004 bestseller, State of Fear, acknowledged the world was growing warmer, but challenged extreme anthropogenic warming scenarios. He predicted future warming at 0.8 degrees C. (His conclusions have been widely misstated.)

　　Crichton’s interest in computer modeling went back forty years. His multiple-discriminant analysis of Egyptian crania, carried out on an IBM 7090 computer at Harvard, was published in the Papers of the Peabody Museum in 1966. His technical publications included a study of host factors in pituitary chromophobe adenoma, in Metabolism, and an essay on medical obfuscation in the New England Journal of Medicine.

　　Crichton’s first bestseller, The Andromeda Strain, was published while he was still a medical student. He later worked full time on film and writing. One of the most popular writers in the world, his books have been translated into thirty-six languages, and thirteen have been made into films.

　　He had a lifelong interest in computers. His feature film Westworld was the first to employ computer-generated special effects back in 1973. Crichton’s pioneering use of computer programs for film production earned him a Technical Achievement Academy Award in 1995.

　　Crichton won an Emmy Award, a Peabody Award, and a Writers Guild of America Award for ER. In 2002, a newly discovered ankylosaur was named for him: Crichtonsaurus bohlini. He had a daughter, Taylor, and lived in Los Angeles. Crichton remarried in 2005.