Review: As all-star whodunits go, ‘Glass Onion’ has enormous appeal. It is a fascinating book of facts and speculation, made even more powerful by Michael Crichton’s ability to make the most seemingly outrageous claims sound plausible. He doesn’t just pull those lines out of the air–he interviews the players and comes up with the facts himself–a quality that makes his book both engrossing and exciting. Here’s a sample:
“For those of you who have been following the story, I am now here to tell you that the government’s theory is an open-and-shut case. What follows may be the most accurate and complete explanation as to what happened. We are talking about a time scale of a few hours, just as the time scale of a hurricane is about a few minutes. I should also add that both the government and the FBI would have a chance to study me afterward as a suspect–a very good thing as well.”
There are all sorts of intriguing pieces to the mystery, beginning with a detailed description of the events and the investigation. It is fascinating reading about how a whole town was so devastated by a mysterious accident that the only people who could come up with the idea of a cover-up were a retired FBI agent and a retired CIA agent. They were both retired to other careers, for all intents and purposes, even though they worked together for many years.
I would have been suspicious of the retired agents at first, but they turned out to be very good investigators and I ended up being convinced that what I knew about the case was indeed true. But Crichton does his best to make the people involved look good, from the sheriff who had just been told by two FBI agents that they had no concrete evidence and had not even found a single eyewitness who could provide one, to the former CIA agent who was finally able to get some good interviews with the town’s residents.
The book is filled with many strange scenes, such as the FBI’s “investigation,” in which two agents showed up in the middle of July and looked at some of what they were sure was a murder scene. In one scene, Crichton has the agents take samples of the blood and DNA, which were then fed into their computers for analysis. And in one scene, he has a retired CIA agent give a tour
