It was poorly written. Crichton has always been a little heavy-handed in getting his point across, his characters are unidimensional and never develop and the ideas he expounds are woefully underdevelopped. This is mostly a generalization, because he has, on occasion, displayed some flashes of genius (Jurassic Park, Andromeda Strain). But his last two books (State of Fear, Next) were really disappointing - the writing was rushed and sloppy, the characters unmemorable, he has a couple good concepts but either fails to develop them satisfactory, or they get only the briefest mention.

Mostly, it was his writing technique that bothered me the most.