Michael Connelly

CHASING THE DIME

Orion 2009
12.9 x 2.2 x 19.8 cm
Format: Paperback
Pages: 341+14

Paperback

Stan + dobry, niewielkie ślady używania na obwolucie, środek czysty, zdjęcie wystawionego egz.

Would you risk your life for a woman you’d never met?

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.

Biography

Michael Connelly decided to become a writer after discovering the books of Raymond Chandler while attending the University of Florida. Once he decided on this direction he chose a major in journalism and a minor in creative writing ' a curriculum in which one of his teachers was novelist Harry Crews.

After graduating in 1980, Connelly worked at newspapers in Daytona Beach and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, primarily specializing in the crime beat. In Fort Lauderdale he wrote about police and crime during the height of the murder and violence wave that rolled over South Florida during the so-called cocaine wars. In 1986, he and two other reporters spent several months interviewing survivors of a major airline crash. They wrote a magazine story on the crash and the survivors which was later short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. The magazine story also moved Connelly into the upper levels of journalism, landing him a job as a crime reporter for the Los Angeles Times, one of the largest papers in the country, and bringing him to the city of which his literary hero, Chandler, had written.

After three years on the crime beat in L.A., Connelly began writing his first novel to feature LAPD Detective Hieronymus Bosch. The novel, The Black Echo, based in part on a true crime that had occurred in Los Angeles , was published in 1992 and won the Edgar Award for Best First Novel by the Mystery Writers of America. Connelly has followed that up with 18 more novels. His books have been translated into 31 languages and have won the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity, Shamus, Dilys, Nero, Barry, Audie, Ridley, Maltese Falcon (Japan), .38 Caliber (France), Grand Prix (France), and Premio Bancarella (Italy) awards.

Michael lives with his family in Florida.

Amazon.com Review

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. --Jane Adams--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

The copy on the galley of Connelly's slick new thriller doesn't mention Hitchcock, but most reviews probably will, with the novel's many surprises and "wrong man" plot line. Even the opening echoes Hitch's North by Northwest, in which Cary Grant's mistaken interception of a bellboy's page leads to disaster; here it's nanotechnology entrepreneur Henry Pierce's getting a phone call that triggers the trouble. The call is for a prostitute, Lilly, and it's the first of many; turns out that the Web site on which she advertises, L.A. Darlings, has Pierce's new home phone number next to a photo of gorgeous Lilly. But when Pierce visits the Web site's offices, he learns that Lilly has vanished. Where has she gone? His search to find the missing woman-prompted by his insatiable curiosity and by memories of his tragic, long-ago hunt for his sister, also a prostitute-draws Pierce into mortal danger. It also pushes him into conflict with the law, for when the cops cotton to Lilly's disappearance, Pierce becomes the number one suspect-serious bad news for this scientist whose company is being visited by a major investor in just a few days. Connelly's plotting is shrink-wrap tight, his characters-particularly Pierce, whose impulsiveness is balanced by his measured applications of the scientific method to analyze his plight-are smartly drawn. It's the rare reader who will be able to finger the villain behind all the mayhem. While very entertaining, however-this is the perfect book for a long airplane ride-the novel lacks the moral resonance and weight of Connelly's most impressive works, such as City of Bones.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.