Chasing the Dime

Rating:
Summary: No small change here!
Review: Entrepreneur, Henry Pierce, is about to make a scientific break through in an experimental field called molecular computing. Henry is a workaholic, which is the cause of a breakup with co-worker. Henry is on his own and settling into a new apartment with new phone number. After plugging in his new phone, he finds he already has messages. However, the messages aren't for Henry, they're for Lilly. Who is Lilly? Henry assumes the calls are for the previous owner of the number and that they would stop but over the next few days, the calls continue. Henry questions some of the callers and finds out they're getting the number from a website called L.A. Darlings, an escort service. If Lilly were an escort, she would have to change her number on the website in order to keep doing business. Henry gets the feeling something has happened to Lilly because she seems to have just disappeared. Henry's curious nature and an event in his past, revolving around his sister, Henry begins to search for Lilly in hopes of helping her. This search leads him into the high-tech world of computers, hackers, scientists and the dark world of escorts and prostitution.

There are surprising twists and Henry finds himself wondering who he can trust and who is truly a friend. Even the police wonder why Henry is so preoccupied with Lilly and suspect that he is the cause of her disappearance. Henry finds that he must analyze the situation as he would a scientific experiment - from the bottom up. People close to him say that there is a fine line between private investigation and private obsession.

Connelly writes so well that I can almost picture the movie....The suspense kept me reading page after page long after I planned to go to sleep. Don't miss Michael Connelly's latest release "Chasing the Dime."

Rating:
Summary: Not his best work.
Review: I am a faithful Michael Connelly reader. I have read all of his works to date. I found this novel very hard to get wrapped up into. I did not find myself routing for the characters as in the past. P.S. - miss Harry very much.

Rating:
Summary: Chasing the Fast Buck
Review: What a disappointment! I am a huge Connelley fan, I eagerly anticipate each new book. The last time he deviated from the Bosch or McCaleb genre with Void Moon it was a great stand alone change of pace.

Not so in this case. This book never gets off the dime! The characters are weak and thinly drawn. The dialogue is missing Connelley's usual crisp punch. This is an intriguing premise for a story line and one can only imagine what Connelley could have done with it if he had applied half the effort he puts into a Bosch novel.

If you want a book that takes no effort to read and a story that neatly wraps up in the last few pages, give this a try just don't expect the exquisitely plotted stories we have come to expect from Connelley.

Rating:
Summary: Much better than the Northwest Airline travel magazine
Review: Connelly leaves the world of Lehane and Vachss and slides into the write-by-number realm usually populated by less talented hacks. The characters are straight off the writers' rack: techno-friend, hero with a painful past and hooker with a decent heart. The plot does turn, but so do the plots of most paperback thrillers I see in airport bookstores. The book isn't bad ... it's just nothing special. I can't remember ever thinking that about one of Connelly's books.

Rating:
Summary: Lackluster effort by one of the greats
Review: I am a huge Michael Connelly fan, and was incredibly disappointed with this book. Connelly takes the easy way out, creating tension by having his protagonist act idiotically throughout. The plot follows a lackluster formula used over and over again by Mary Higgins Clark and others of her ilk. The solution comes completely out of the blue, and elicits a big "so what." There is very little of the sense of character and place that usually makes reading Connelly such a joy. And, after the polished style of City of Bones, I was disappointed to see that this new offering is as poorly edited as some as his earlier books. (For example, Connelly cannot resist the urge to explain every reaction by his protagonist in excrutiating detail.)

All in all, an amateurish effort by one of the most professional mystery writers out there. I wish I would have re-read City of Bones, one of the best mysteries of the last few years, instead of wasting my time of this one.

P.S. The description of the technology is fascinating.

Rating:
Summary: Another Great Novel
Review: Michael Connelly has once again proven that he is one of the best authors around. In Chasing the Dime Connelly combines cutting edge science with unbelievable suspense to produce a beautifully written thriller which will keep you reading late into the night. I will not repeat the book description here, but I will say you will be hard pressed to read a better novel this year. Connelly just keeps getting better with each book and I am looking forward to his next edition...

Rating:
Summary: Worth more than a plugged nickel
Review: Henry Pierce, rising star in the world's newest profession, molecular computer engineering, gets a new phone number. The number previously belonged to a girl named Lilly who apparently is engaged in the world's oldest profession.

Curiosity and a sense of personal guilt launch Henry on a quest to find this girl. It is a world of shadows and mirrors where things do not often lead to tidy answers. As Pierce descends deeper into the spiraling black hole, his entire universe is threatened.

This book lacks the dark introspection of Connelly's best works, but it reads swift and clean. Pierce is neither saint nor sinner, hero or villain, but the reader cares not only for his survival but the survival of his vision.

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Summary: A post dot com high tech plot
Review: With the demise of the dot com era, how can a novelist invoke high technology as the backdrop? Well, nano tech is still promising; which one could interpret as it never hitting the levels of hype that the dot coms reached. This book gives a nice peep into the vagaries of fund raising for a nano tech startup. (Indeed, of any startup.) The frantic search for an angel investor; the gimlet eye on the burn rate; the negotiating over (percentage) points of equity that the angel can get for his money; anxiety over bad publicity queering a deal...

Connolly keeps the pace flowing. The protagonist is the chief scientist and founder of a startup, who find himself implacably manipulated by an unknown puppet master who seems to anticipate his reactions at every turn. Beatings, shootings, computer breakins, naked chicks. Gosh. An old fashioned whodunnit, updated for early 21st century Los Angeles.

I suggest this to you. Read this book. But while doing so, squint a little. Strip out the high tech references. Then see the beautiful murdered woman, the sleazy, live hooker, the vicious thugs, the confused, clever hero. All by the sun-drenched beaches and boulevards of Los Angeles. Can you find echoes of Raymond Chandler and the whole LA Noir scene?

Rating:
Summary: Henry the whiz kid, not Harry the cop - but classic Connelly
Review: Henry Pierce, a genius who may have just invented a molecular computer, moves into a new pad and discovers his new phone belonged to Lilly, a sexy brunette who advertised it on a web site. Lilly's rent, pager and PO Box are paid up but her phone isn't, and it was recycled to a new user in less than three months. Has Connelly completely abandoned his attention to detail, or is Henry being set up? If so, how and by whom?

Henry's sister was a hooker killed more than a decade before by the Dollmaker, a homicidal character in two early Harry Bosch novels. That leaves Henry with a compulsive need to find out what happened to Lilly. Though his actions are not those of a rational, intelligent man, Connelly presents the bizarre events that follow in a way that both holds your attention and makes you eager to see where he's going next. Detective Renner knows he's not getting the whole truth from Henry who, through a combination of his own missteps and other evidence that points his way, has become the number one suspect in Lilly's disappearance. Cody Zeller, a white hat hacker and buddy from Stanford, joins in to sniff out whatever information he can. When Henry follows that trail, he winds up in the clutches of a nasty porn promoter who travels with his silent enforcer, appropriately named six-eight.

Before his world completely crashes, Henry applies his super logical mind to cut through it all, setting up an exciting finish. It's different from a Harry Bosch book, for sure, and still a first rate story by Michael Connelly.

Rating:
Summary: Disappointing...
Review: More and more, Michael Connelly's books seem to involve rather unbelievable plots and to require his characters to do things that are stupid, unbelievable, or just plain out of character. Why Henry Pierce, the protagonist of this new book, doesn't just change his phone number when he starts getting calls for a missing prostitute, is never really clear. Oh sure, Connelly attempts to provide an explanation in the form of a backstory involving his missing, then found dead, sister, but it never really rings true. It just doesn't successfully explain the obsession he has with finding the other girl, in the face of a couple of one-dimensional, paper thin bad guys who beat him up and hang him off the balcony of his twelfth floor apartment, or the impending visit of a financier who might be the savior he's been looking for, for his molecular computing firm. It's hard to believe that the main cop in the investigation puts his sights on Pierce, because, dontcha know, the Good Samaritan often turns out to be the perpetrator (I'm sure this is true, but it can't explain the extended harassment this guy gives Pierce). Then Pierce suddenly puts all the pieces together and suspects his ex-girlfriend must be behind it all (shades of Terry McCaleb suspecting that Harry Bosch is a killer in _A Darkness More Than Night_). It all rings false--something like the "idiot plot" of Roger Ebert, in which characters act in idiotic ways because the plot requires it, not out of believable motivations arising from their characters. Still, it was fast-moving and there is some interesting material about molecular computers and how they may change the world. But, ultimately, it's a real disappointment from a "master" like Connelly.