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.
