re:mote voices

Title: Chasing the Dime
Author: Michael Connelly
Publisher:Orion

Chasing The Dime is one of the most recent thrillers by writer Michael Connelly, and the first I’ve read by him. The main character Henry Pierce is a scientist, working in the highly competitive and specialist area of nano-technology. As his company comes closer and closer to a big break through he has become more obsessed with his work. Unfortunately this has driven a wedge between him and girlfriend, so that he is forced to move out just as the project is about to break, and just as they are about to try and secure some seriously big time funding. But things start to go askew when he moves into his new place, and finds that his new number used to belong to a girl called Lilly. A girl who is receiving a lot of calls from strange men trying to make arrangements to be in hotel rooms. Curious Pierce starts to look into why Lilly has given up her old number, and seemingly disappeared. Before he knows what is happening though he is being beaten up by “digital pimps” and staked out by the police who think that he has killed the girl.

This sets up a thriller with a large dose of tech undertones. At various time throughout the book there are discussion on nano-tech, discussing the ideas behind it, and how competitive the field is, with the hopes of where it could end up going. Which is contrast by a different kind of tech, that of the internet, how a girl has a website, which is just part of a sex empire, with cell phones being used to arrange meetings, and how all of this together is a huge industry. As a character Pierce may be incredibly smart on a work level, but when it comes to life outside the office, it has to be said he is something of a fuck-up. To be fair, he may not have anticipated how deeply he was going to get sucked in, but at each step he makes so many obvious mistakes that it isn’t real a surprise when he attracts too much attention. From accessing porn sites in his office, to going in to a house because he finds the door is open. With each step Pierce seems to make things worse for himself, and to be honest that becomes part of the appeal of continuing to read, I couldn’t believe how much of a mess he was making of things, and really just had to see how bad it would get. A couple of times he shows flashes of intelligence, intuitive jumps, and only those occasions serve to keep him stumbling along at all.

As a genre the crime/thriller is one that I still only dabble in a little, normally if some aspect of the concept attracts my attention. In this case it was the mixtures of technology and someone getting into a field alien to them, and over their head. Like many of the thrillers I have read, this one left me with mixed feelings, there are bits where I just struggle to believe that some people would behave that way, and others where there is a certain amusement/fascination of constructed car crash scenarios.