On the Line
by SJ Rozan
Series: Lydia Chin & Bill Smith, #10Hardcover, 309 pg.
Minotaur Books, 2010
Read: May 25 – 26, 2017
Okay, it’s Bill Smith’s turn as the POV character — and that’s a good thing, because this would be a very short book if it wasn’t. A figure from Bill’s past is back, looking for revenge. The electronically altered voice on the phone belongs to someone that was sent to prison, in part due to Bill’s work, and now he’s out and is ready for Bill to pay what he’s due. He’s demanding that Bill play this game he’s devised in order to keep his hostage alive for the next 12 hours (or so).
The hostage, of course, is Lydia Chin. This is what makes this book different from all the other books where the hero is racing against the clock to play the twisted game of the psychopath in order to save the hostage. The hostage isn’t someone created just to be in peril, this is someone we’ve become attached to over the last 9 books (half the time being in her brain, I should add) — and Bill’s got a lot more history with and affection for her than any of us readers do. Again, this is stuff we know, not something manufactured for the purposes of this plot. So the stakes are higher for Bill than most heroes in this plot, and we believe it, too.
Without Lydia to work with, Bill has to get help from others — there’s just no way that he can do this on his own. Enter Lydia’s friend Mary, the NYPD detective; and her cousin Linus, the hacker/computer guru. Even with these two replacing Lydia, Bill spends a lot of the time seemingly over-matched. Now that I think about it, he’s so distracted by worry that a lot of the thinking is left to others, Bill mostly reacts to things in anger and fear. All believably, I should add.
The kidnapper/tormentor isn’t some psychopathic genius, some criminal mastermind — he’s a smart, committed criminal who has spent a lot of time planning. This means that the reader can see why he’d go off the bend like he does, why Bill can defeat him — and yet spend so many pages clueless. He is clever, I shouldn’t downplay that — the game he’s set up, the clues (and what he does with them) show that this is no slouch that Bill’s up against. Thankfully, neither are Bill’s allies — for 2010, one of the solutions involves a ingenious use of social media (actually, it’d be a pretty sly use in 2017, too).
The conversations between Lydia and Bill are what I’m always saying are the highlight of these books — in this book, their chats are brief proof of life kind of things. This means that every word, every nuance counts — and it’s primarily in what these two don’t have to say to communicate that is the winning element.
I enjoyed this one so much — even if Bill wasn’t as sharp as he should’ve been, even if Lydia is practically a non-factor throughout (but when she gets involved, it counts). Rozan knows these two, their world, so well that this story seems effortless (which it just couldn’t be).
It seems effortless for her, I should say, the reader is left hanging on every development, every twist, every detail, just hoping that Bill can save the day. One of Rozan’s best.
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