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Chasing the Dime
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Chasing the Dime
Unavailable
Chasing the Dime
Audiobook10 hours

Chasing the Dime

Written by Richard Powers

Narrated by Jonathan Davis

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

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.
LanguageEnglish
Release dateNov 1, 2005
ISBN9781594833601
Unavailable
Chasing the Dime
Author

Richard Powers

Richard Powers is the author of thirteen novels. His most recent, The Overstory, won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction. He is also the recipient of a MacArthur Fellowship and the National Book Award, and he has been a four-time National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. He lives in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains.

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Reviews for Chasing the Dime

Rating: 3.6009317180124225 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

644 ratings25 reviews

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    It seems that after every three or four of his novels featuring Hieronymus ‘Harry’ Bosch, Michael Connelly likes to shake things up a bit, and bring in a new protagonist. Some of these ‘stand-alone’ ventures have led to their own series, while others remain simply as one-off episodes. Yet even these are grounded in the universe of Harry Bosch, and there is normally some overlap through the medium of appearances by peripheral characters from the Bosch series, or an oblique reference to one of his previous cases.This particular standalone novel follows Henry Pierce, a chemist on the brink of an astounding breakthrough in the field of molecular memory, potentially worth billions to the computer industry. Having recently split up with his partner Nicole, Henry has moved into a new apartment. On his first night there, the phone (a newly installed line with what he had understood to be a completely new number) starts ringing, with a series of men wanting to contact ‘Lilly’. Bemused, he does some basic research and identifies Lilly as an escort whose services are advertised on an exclusive website. Now intrigued, and seeking a diversion from both the considerable work pressures he has faced bringing his start-up company to the brink of a major flotation and his emotional travail following his split from Nicole, he resolves to try to find out more about Lilly.This plunges him into a shady world of sexual exploitation, violence and organised crime, all of which emerges with Connelly’s customary facility to craft a gripping plot. Connelly seems particularly gifted at ensnaring his readers. I know nothing at all about the science behind Pierce’s business interests, and ordinarily the explanation of them might well have made my eyes glaze over. Connelly, however, succeeds in conveying the technical wizardry behind them without making even the most scientifically ignorant reader (i.e. me) feel at all bogged down. Another gripping and successful story written with Connelly’s characteristically effortless prose.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    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 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..
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I guessed whodunit and that the book was a mystery solvable by the reader and not just a procedural story of a computer researcher and owner of a company who gets a new cell phone and tries to discover the whereabouts of the person who last had its phone number. Maybe it's because I've read enough Michael Connelly to recognize that his detective stories are also mysteries.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Not up to Connelly's standards: not credible, and slow.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I enjoyed this one: it is a thriller about nanotechnology (they call it nano, because it is a tech smaller than micro). The book starts wonderfully, with a researcher who just got a new apartment and a new phone: he receives a call for the old owner of the apartment, then more and more calls. I liked that, we all get wrong numbers and weird calls. These phone calls remain at the heart of the story, all mixed up with a big techno deal. Great composition, excellent psychology, intriguing. It is really well done and fascinating.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Another good Connelly thriller. A departure from the Harry Bosch series, but has all the trademark Michael Connelly taught plot structure and twists and turns
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    This book kept my interest though it was hard to buy that so much of the story was based on what the main character would do.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A good read, but the ending was a bit far-fetched.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Henry Pierce gets a new phone number and starts getting messages intended for a call girl. He can't help but get involved and try to find this woman who seems to have gone missing. Before long, he is entangled in a web of lies, sex escorts, and murder. This story has many twists and turns. I enjoyed it a lot.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Decent tale of vice, murder and computer geeks. This is the only Michael Connelly I have read, and though my husband who has read most of them reckons it is one of his worst, I quite liked it. It engaged my interest enough to have me yelling in frustration at the main character as he blundered into yet another tight corner. When all was revealed at the end, I found myself admiring the twists and turns the story had taken, and the things I hadn't spotted, though I felt a little disappointed that a fair chunk of the plot hung on a rather unlikely assumption.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Not realising that this was not a Harry Bosch novel, I wasted some energy waiting for him to turn up. By the time light dawned, I was engrossed. Connelly depicts a protagonist who is interesting but unlikely to be a very rewarding friend and I could see why his girlfriend had left him. For a long time I could not understand why thecharacter was so compelled to take such risky actons when he had so much to lose ; this was an essential plot element and I thought it grossly artificial until the whole story had unfolded. The technology that provides the tale's environment fascinated me but I found some of the dated consumer technolgy quite jarring in a story about emerging technologies. For all that, it was an emotionally rich adventure.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Sexy and sleezy in the best possible way. Connelly has a way of making things work.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    In Chasing the Dime, Michael Connelly steps outside Harry Bosch's world with a kind of techno-thriller. Big-brained Henry Pierce runs a technology startup that's trying to build a molecular computer. Dime is moderately enjoyable, but falls far short of Connelly's excellent Bosch novels. It's quite prosy and overwritten, and lacks punch and focus.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    The weakest of all Michael Connelly's books. The pace of the book is very slow to begin with and the ending is very far fetched...As a book on it's own, it ok. As a Connelly book it's bad, he has written some far better books than this one.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    The first Michael Connelly I read about a company involved in nano technology and the hunt for the murderer of a prostitute.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Connelly is one of the few writers I can think of who never loses quality whether it's a series book or a non-series. Any book with his name on it is a guaranteed excellent read. This one is no different. Start up entrepreneur and scientist Henry Pierce gets a new phone in the apartment he has to rent when his wife throws him out. The new phone number, obviously belonged to a very busy prostitute before he got it. Why in the world would someone who's business is dependant on a specific telephone number just abandon it?
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Chasing the Dime is Connelly’s departure from the more formulaic Bosch police procedural novels. In some ways, it reminds me of Richard Aleas (Charles Ardai)’s Songs of Innocence in that it features not some hard-boiled tough old detective, but a soft-boiled young innocent who somehow gets caught up in a crime world out of his control. Rather than an innocent hayseed like John Blake, Connelly uses as his main character, Henry Pierce, the geeky founder of a high- tech company about to snare its biggest investor yet.

    Pierce, recently separated from Nicky, the former IT Manager of his company, has just gotten a new apartment in Venice, California, and with the new apartment, comes a new telephone number. Funny thing is the new phone number appears to be someone’s old number, a Lily, who is receiving countless calls from guys, guys who want her to come to their hotel rooms. After the fifteenth or so phone call, Pierce finds out the number is coming off a website and he is determined to find Lily and get her to change the number on her provocative website. Along the way, he realizes that no one has seen Lily in five weeks, that her apartment is covered with dust and that there is blood all over her bedsheets, and that by breaking into her apartment and investigating, his fingerprints are now everywhere and he looks like suspect number one, a John who maybe got obsessed with Lily and did her in. At least, that is what Detective Renner thinks when the bloody bed is reported to the police and Pierce can’t explain too well why he ended up in her apartment.

    Pierce, of course, is warned off the case, first by a colleague of Lily’s, and then by the head of the website and his one-man army, Six-Eight, a nickname referring to the man’s height. After Pierce is pummelled into submission so badly that he ends up in the hospital and threatened with a murder trial, he continues to poke his nose into a case where it doesn’t really belong, first accusing one person than another of complicity in framing him for Lily’s murder, even though he never met Lily while she was alive.

    It is a fast-moving story that only suffers when Pierce does stupid things that make the reader cringe and think why on earth is he being so stupid and leaving his prints on everything and inviting trouble.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Good enough to keep me up all night until I finished it. Has some definite "red herrings" to keep you guessing who the real killer was but still was able to figure it out before the reveal. Learned a little about the biochemical-technological industry, too.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A good read....I enjoyed the audio as always. Henry Pierce has a whole new life — new apartment, new telephone, new telephone number. But the first time he checks his messages, he discovers that someone had the number before him. The messages on his line are for a woman named Lilly, and she is in some kind of serious trouble. Pierce is inexorably drawn into Lilly’s world, and it’s unlike any world he’s ever known. It is a nighttime world of escort services, websites, sex, and secret identities. Pierce tumbles through a hole, abandoning his orderly life in a frantic race to save the life of a woman he has never met.

    Pierce’s skills as a computer entrepreneur allow him to trace Lilly’s last days with some precision. But every step into Lilly’s past takes Pierce deeper into a web of inescapable intricacy — and a decision that could cost him everything he owns and holds dear.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    This was OK but I was slightly disappointed. It seemed too far fetched. I usually like Michael Connelly novels a lot but this one didn't quite work. It was interesting to read about DNA computing though and I did look it up afterwards.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I love Connelly's books, but this one is totally independent of all his series - - - no Harry Bosch, no Micky Haller, and I missed them! Good story though about a scientist who ventures into a world of vice, and gets pulled in further.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Michael Connelly’s books are always good. This one does not feature his staple detective, Harry Bosch, although the main character did have peripheral involvement with a case from a previous novel relating to serial killings by the “doll maker” (see [book:The Concrete Blonde].)

    Henry Pierce has had a brilliant idea that may soon translate into an enormous fortune. A chemist, he has discovered a method to create a new power source for nano-computers, His firm, Amedeo Technologies, has the backing of a venture capitalist, and all that is needed is a lock on the patents that will secure them the rights to his inventive process. After breaking up with Nicole, the intelligence officer of his company, he moves into a new apartment only to discover that his new phone number is the same as that of a call girl’s website. Apparently, her phone had been disconnected and her number reassigned to Henry’s new phone. Henry tries to contact the woman only to discover that she seems to have disappeared. Troubled by the killing of his sister many years before — a detail that does not initially explain his obsession with the case, but read on — he plays detective and learns troubling information about the girl’s disappearance. She had been a big star of a porn magnate. Despite warnings from a colleague of hers and from a private detective who had been hired by the girl’s mother, Henry pushes on, only to be beaten up by the goons working for an unknown person. Pierce becomes more and more enmeshed in the case, and, as evidence pointing to his own culpability surfaces, the police start to wonder if he himself is not responsible for the girl’s death. Then it gets even better as Henry engages his rational scientific skills and puts some of the pieces together. Wondering if the police had really searched his car, he traces his steps back and realizes that, perhaps, instead something had been placed in it. He discovers a strange key in his backpack. Tracking down its origin, he learns the key fits a lock in a storage room that he was unaware of, but that had been rented under his name. He discovers the missing girl’s body in a freezer in the storage room. Henry decides to head off the setup he feels sure is enveloping him and realizes that everything points to someone in the company who wants Proteus, his discovery that would revolutionize nano-technology. Don’t be put off by Henry’s seemingly stupid moves in the beginning.

    Connelly is too good a writer to leave things unexplained, and everything is satisfactorily resolved.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    This was not my favorite Connelly. Part of it is just me. Despite being a gigantic nerd, I don’t like reading about science and technology. Any time the plot got into the science of what Pierce and his company were trying to do, my eyes just glazed over. Beyond that, I found this mystery to be weak. No matter how much Connelly tries to justify Pierce’s involvement with Lilly’s disappearance (the old 'my dead sister was a prostitute and I didn’t save her' excuse), I just couldn’t buy his obsession with it. By the time we get to the end and find out the truth about what’s going on, it all seems a little contrived. A manufactured conspiracy. Thankfully I’m already a Connelly fan, because if this was the first I’d read, I wouldn’t continue.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    Had trouble with the title and the hero. He stupidly neglected his business for a dead prostitute. The connection between his sister and the dead woman was not strong enough for me to believe he couldn’t wait a week to investigate. Read to the end nonetheless.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    I like Connolly’s pacing and how he brings out tension slowly. Also I found the insider's view really interesting. It's not a world I'll ever be part of.