For me, Crichton went off the rails with Rising Sun and Disclosure, which are mainly driven by animus against Japanese business practices and women filing sexual harassment claims. Like, if you were a rich white guy in the early 90s, those were two things that right-leaning media outlets would have you worry about. Crichton by that point had lost the imaginative independent thinking that drove his early work, and basically ate up and regurgitated the media panic of the day into two novels that have aged incredibly poorly.