Chasing the Dime
by Michael Connelly
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Book Summary Information
Author: Michael ConnellyEdition: Mass Market Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2003-08
ISBN: 044661162X
Number of pages: 448
Publisher: Warner Vision
Book Reviews of Chasing the Dime
Book Review: There's much to consider
Summary: 5 Stars
As a fiction writer myself, I've grown to love Connelly's work. I had a hard time with his first book, "The Black Echo" because much of it seemed like showing off--which may be what it takes to get recognized. His later books, though, settle on me as Raymond Chandler's have done with a rich protagonist whose observations reveal the human animal in action. While many people may read Connelly's books for the whodunit factor alone, his characters stay with me long after I reach the last page. It's hard to create strong stories with vivid characters, and Connelly has become masterful.
For example, in "Lost Light," the book I read before this one, Detective Harry Bosch tries to find the murderer of his mother 35 years after the fact much in the same way novelist James Ellroy, in real life, tried to find out why his mother was murdered in Temple City in 1958. (Read Ellroy's nonfictional "My Dark Places" to see what was probably Connelly's inspiration.) In "Lost Light," Bosch's mother is revealed to have been a prostitute trying to find an out and a better life to help her son. Just when she was about to do so, she was murdered.
Connelly's "Chasing the Dime," is a different book in that the protagonist is not a detective but a 34-year-old scientist, Henry Pierce, with a start-up biotech company looking for venture capital. The story begins as Henry, obsessed over his science and his company's needs, has just lost the love of his life, a co-worker. He's in emotional turmoil. When his new telephone at his new apartment keeps ringing with men looking for someone named Lilly, Henry learns his new number matches an escort's on a pornographic website. He also learns that Lilly has been missing for more than a month. He's compelled to find out if she's okay because it connects eerily to his sister's disappearance when he was young.
What I admire in this novel in particular is that the protagonist does not have the tools or interviewing techniques of a working police detective, yet Henry is driven and uses what he has. He's also under time pressure and the possibility of a sleazy PR disaster just when he's seeking millions of dollars for his company.
"Chasing the Dime" as a title works on a few levels. It's a phrase about trying to earn a living, yet the return does not match the effort. It suggests the futileness of the working life, yet we Americans like to work--and Henry is the epitome of that. The rewards of work are even less for the prostitutes that Henry comes to know, particularly Lilly's coworker Robin. She may earn big money, but she pays for it in physical and mental abuse.
Americans are often major innovators, too, and Henry's goal, using organic molecules, is to create electrical circuitry so small, computers could become the size of a dime. This is real science Connelly writes about, our future, and it makes me think how we as consumers, in chasing the latest gadgets, may be doing so at the expense of losing something else.
Contrasting all this, yet becoming a suspect, is Henry's former girlfriend Nichole, who has a small tattoo of a Chinese character pictogram that means "happiness comes from within, not from material things."
The twists in the end of the story amaze. Just when I thought it was over, wham, something else happens. Connelly mixes plot and character like few others. After I recommended one of his books to a friend, another working writer, she complained that she was spending too much time reading Connelly instead of working. Maybe that's what we all need.
Summary of Chasing the Dime
The phone messages waiting for Henry Pierce clearly aren't for him: "Where is Lilly? This is her number. It's on the site." Pierce has just moved into a new apartment, and he's been "chasing the dime"--doing all it takes so his company comes out first with a scientific breakthrough worth millions. But he can't get the messages for Lilly out of his head. As Pierce tries to help a woman he has never met, he steps into a world of escorts, websites, sex, and secret passions. A world where his success and expertise mean nothing...and where he becomes the chief suspect in a murder case, trapped in the fight of his life.Henry Pierce is about to become very rich--as soon as his firm, Amedeo Technologies, gets an infusion of capital from a big backer. But the brilliant chemist's workaholic habits are disrupted when his lover, the former intelligence officer of his company, breaks up with him. Lonely and dispirited, he moves into a new apartment and gets a new phone number that attracts a lot of callers, but not for him. His new telephone number seems to have previously belonged to one Lilly Quinlan, an escort whose Internet photo arouses Henry's curiosity, especially when L.A. Darlings, whose Web page features the beautiful young woman, can't tell Henry how to find her. With the same single-mindedness that made him a high-tech superstar, Pierce pursues his search for the missing girl, motivated by his guilt over the disappearance years earlier of his own sister, who, like Lilly, was also a prostitute (and ultimately the victim of the Dollmaker, a serial killer from Connelly's 1994 novel The Concrete Blonde.) But that motive is too thin to support Pierce's sudden abandonment of his career at such a critical juncture, even if forces unknown to him are setting him up for a fall. Despite those holes in the plot and a less than compelling protagonist, the novel succeeds due to Connelly's literary and expository gifts and his more interesting secondary characters. --Jane Adams
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