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Book Review of Chasing the Dime

Chasing the Dime
Chasing the Dime
Author: Michael Connelly
Genre: Mystery, Thriller & Suspense
Book Type: Mass Market Paperback
Barbllm avatar reviewed on + 241 more book reviews
Helpful Score: 1


While I am a fan of Connellys 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. Henrys workaholism has cost him his relationship with Nicole, his firms intelligence officer.

Henry does a lot of things wrong: he breaks and enters into Lillys house, looking for clues; he refuses to give the details of his investigation to Detective Renner, which turns Pierce into a suspect in Lillys 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 villains reveal is a nice twist, but overall I would rather re-read a Bosch novel.