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If I had known how incredibly hilarious and exhilarating S.J. Rozan’s On the Line was going to be, I would have picked it up much sooner. I think I laughed almost as much as my heart raced with the high-speed suspense. It’s the perfect book to read when life throws you a curveball.
P.I. Bill Smith is yanked into a deadly game when someone from his past kidnaps his partner, Lydia Chin, and uses her as a pawn. The unstable psychopath then demands that Bill follow a series of clues that’ll help him find Lydia. The first clue leads him to the body of a Chinese hooker who’s dressed like Lydia. It also puts him on the run from the police.
Along with a tech-savvy hacker named Linus and his cohort, Trella, Bill races to uncover the meaning behind random garbage that the psychopath has left in orange bags. But when Linus’s Aunt Mary—a police officer—and a Chinese pimp named Lu get involved, it puts Lydia in even more danger.
Now Bill must outsmart a man who was unstable even before prison made him worse—and he needs the help of his friends and enemies alike to outwit the ultimate foe.
On the Line explodes off the page right from the beginning, and it doesn’t let up until the end. It was so speedy, filled with harrowing twists and turns, that I nearly read all 309 pages in one night. I simply could not stop turning pages.
Even though the Bill Smith and Lydia Chin series has been around for a while, I could still get into the characters and care about what happens to them. Author S. J. Rozan brings out each character’s personality, making them stand out as individuals that you could easily point out on the street.
But On the Line is also howling-out-loud funny. I don’t think a mystery has made me laugh so hard since the Stephanie Plum novels. Though the foul language is sometimes pretty bad, the story made me laugh, so I ignored the rough language and got caught up in the adrenaline rush instead.
Both Bill and the psychopath are extremely unstable yet brilliant in their actions, often causing me to laugh so hard that I feared I’d cracked a rib. The two characters are definitely not your normal good guy and bad guy, and they make this read matchless to anything else on the shelves. It’s a tremendously fun way to escape life for a while.
You’ll just have to pick up a copy of On the Line to fully understand my praise for such a great read. As for me, I’ll be hunting down earlier installments in the Bill Smith/Lydia Chin series.
