CHASING THE DIME

CHASING THE DIME by Michael Connelly

From Amazon.com:

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. 

I borrowed this book for my Kindle from my library, thinking I had been lucky enough to grab a brand new book without having to wait months.  As I started reading it, I was slightly disappointed.  It didn't seem to live up to the other books I've read by Mr. Connelly.  It was interesting enough, but I thought the main character was unbelievable.  He put so much effort into trying to find Lilly, a woman he had absolutely no connection to other than a shared phone number.  He put himself into harm's way and even wound up in deep trouble with the police over this obsession.  It just didn't ring true for me.

It wasn't until I finished the book that I realized that this was an older book by Mr. Connelly, released in 2002.  No wonder it didn't have the same feel and strength of his newer books.  I should have known - my library's selection of Kindle books is very poor, with hardly any newer releases.  Live and learn.