Search - Chasing the Dime

Only one or two of Connelly's continuing characters (attorney Langwiser, for example) show up in this departure novel. As in The Poet the protagonist here is not a cop of any kind, but the "scientific mind" of chemist Henry Pierce will take one on a typical convoluted-Connelly ride and provide enough thrills and chills to satisfy even the most jaded reader.

Keeps you guessing til the end, the story is very good and you won't get it until the very end, so it will keep anyone's interest all the way through,he is one of my favorite writers

This is an excellent read. It hits the ground running with a good fast pace. I only have one little negative - in a few places the narrative exposition is too long and slows things down, but not for long. That's the only flaw, otherwise, great book.

While I am a fan of Connelly’s Harry Bosch novels, this standalone book, while having a great plot and pacing, suffered from the characters doing some incredibly stupid things. Connelly sets in motion a Hitchcockian plot when mild-mannered chemist Henry Pierce gets a new phone number that had previously belonged to Lilly Quinlan, a young woman working for an escort service. When Pierce begins getting messages from men for Lilly, instead of simply changing the number (or having his assistant Monica do this), he investigates her disappearance.

Henry does have his reasons for doing so, most of which involve the murder of his sister, Isabel, at the hands of the serial killer known as the Dollmaker. However, Henry is also a workaholic whose breakthrough in molecular computing will make him a rich man, if he can get funding from venture capitalist Maurice Goddard. Henry’s workaholism has cost him his relationship with Nicole, his firm’s intelligence officer.

Henry does a lot of things wrong: he breaks and enters into Lilly’s house, looking for clues; he refuses to give the details of his investigation to Detective Renner, which turns Pierce into a suspect in Lilly’s disappearance, and he looks at hardcore fetish porn involving Lilly on his work computer. For a man who is supposedly a genius, these are all very stupid things to do, and he does them without much justification on his part.

The villain’s reveal is a nice twist, but overall I would rather re-read a Bosch novel.

Another exciting book from Michael Connelly! Excellent story with lots of intrigue and a surprize ending!

This one was different from most of Michael Connelly's detective or journalist murders, centered this time on the a victim wrongly accused, set up for reasons not clear in the beginning. It was an enjoyable read with a unique angle that made me cling to every fact and turn the pages faster. The references to other crimes and persons from his other books builds the interest and piques the insiders feeling of knowing more than what was written. Very clever.