Rising Sun

Rising Sun (1992) by Michael Crichton is the techno-corporate thriller you reach for when you want murder, boardrooms, and early-’90s anxiety about Japan Inc. buying literally everything that isn’t nailed down.

This is the Ballantine Books paperback edition, humming with fax machines, pagers and men in suits who say “This goes all the way to the top” at least once a chapter. It comes fully barcoded and respectable with ISBN 0345380371, so your deep dive into trans-Pacific corporate paranoia is properly catalogued for posterity.

As sold by Crappy Old Books, the condition is proudly Used. Not “as new”, not “fine”, and certainly not “still smells of the bookshop”. This is the version that has already lived through a couple of office moves, a 1990s airport departure lounge and one ill-advised all-nighter where someone stayed up too late reading about industrial espionage instead of finishing their spreadsheet.

You can realistically expect:

• A Ballantine thriller cover radiating early-’90s seriousness: bold serif title, looming imagery, and the vague sense that global capitalism is about to have a very bad day.

• Tanned pages, the exact tone of an over-photocopied internal memo that says “CONFIDENTIAL” and absolutely has been left in the printer tray.

• A creased spine, forensic proof that previous owners blew straight past the “I’ll just read one more chapter” boundary until the binding itself gave up asking.

Condition notes, stripped of their polite euphemisms:

• “Used” – people have actually read this. On trains. In break rooms. On sofas under the pretence of “just unwinding” while actually absorbing a mini-seminar on corporate politics.

• “May show signs of wear” – corners softened, edges scuffed, maybe a tiny battle scar where it lost an encounter with a briefcase zip.

• “Pages clean and intact” – all the murder, meetings and misread cultural signals are present and correct. No missing confession, no vanished chapter where the plot suddenly makes sense.

This is a book for you if:

• You enjoy Crichton in full “smart people making bad decisions with technology” mode, but with added boardrooms and less dinosaur.

• You have an unholy fondness for scenes where someone pauses a crucial negotiation to take a phone call on a massive mobile brick.

• You like your thrillers to involve both homicide and PowerPoint energy, with strong supporting roles for lawyers, cops and several people who know more than they are saying.

• You’re perfectly happy for your copy to look like it has already survived one corporate merger and an unnecessary management offsite.

Probable reading experience:

• First chapters: “Oh hello, this is aggressively 1992 and I love it.”

• Middle stretch: you start muttering things like “that’s not how any of this HR policy would work” but keep turning pages anyway because the plot is faster than your scepticism.

• Final act: book glued to your hands, snacks mysteriously gone, vague suspicion that you now qualify as middle management in a fictional Japanese conglomerate.

Crappy Old Books is not here to pretend this is an untouched collector’s piece. This is a working paperback. It is designed to be shoved in a bag, read on a commute, abandoned on a coffee table and picked up again with biscuit crumbs nearby. The cover may be scuffed, the spine may be cracked, but the story is fully operational and ready to deliver vintage Crichton-grade corporate mayhem.

In short:
Rising Sun (1992) by Michael Crichton, Ballantine Books paperback, ISBN 0345380371, in honestly Used condition, is a slightly battered, highly readable time capsule of early-’90s tech, tension and boardroom intrigue. Buy it from Crappy Old Books, enjoy the nostalgia, and be grateful your own office politics do not, as far as you know, involve homicide.

Keep browsing: See more Thrillers books Other books by Michael Crichton