It's a city within a city, of smells, sounds, dark shops, and close-knit families; it's a world all its own. And in all of New York's Chinatown, there is no one like P.I. Lydia Chin, who has a nose for trouble, a disapproving Chinese mother, and a partner named Bill Smith who's been living above a bar for sixteen years. Hired to find some precious stolen porcelain, Lydia follows a trail of clues from highbrow art dealers into a world of Chinese gangs. Suddenly, this case has become as complex as her community itself—and as deadly as a killer on the loose...

It flows through the Bronx like a river between banks of faded elegance. And at the end of the avenue called the Grand Concourse is the place people go to die, the Bronx Home for the Aged. The only trouble is the people dying there are going before their time. Bill Smith has been hired by an old friend to investigate the brutal killing of a young security guard on the Bronx Home grounds. Going undercover, Smith wades out into a sea of violence and lies washing up against the old brick building. When a second murder is committed, Smith knows that there’s a method to the madness. With the help of bright, young Chinese-American investigator Lydia Chin, Smith uncovers a web of corruption that’s found a home in the Bronx. Now he has to figure out who will die next.

It's a long way from the cramped, dreary sweatshops where Lydia Chin's mother once sewed for the heady world of fashion. But in New York City, worlds collide. And a petite, Chinese-American P.I. can still rub shoulders with the rich, the poor, the beautiful, and the depraved. Elegant, porcelain-skinned Genna Jing is sure her latest designs are worth a fortune. That's why she is willing to pay the fifty grand being demanded by the person who stole her design book. But when Lydia—backed by her partner Bill Smith—makes the drop, everything goes wrong. Soon a simple case of high-fashion extortion leads Lydia and Bill from Chinatown to Park Avenue, and from murder to more money: a million dollars in exchange for a missing man's life...

Bill Smith is going undercover again as a favor to an old friend who wants him to investigate thievery on the 40-story Manhattan site of Crowell Construction’s latest project. His bricklaying is a little rusty, but passable as he checks out the foreman who’s under suspicion. A crane operator has disappeared–along with some heavy machinery. But when a well-orchestrated riot causes the foreman’s “accidental” death, Smith plunges into a morass of bribery, blackmail and blood looking for answers. With the help of his Chinese-American partner Lydia Chin, he follows a trail of twisted loyalties, old-fashioned greed and organized crime to its heart-stopping conclusion. Murder–with no end in sight.

Joining the company of Sue Grafton, Jonathan Kellerman, and Patricia Cornwell, Shamus Award-winner S.J. Rozan now owns a coveted Anthony Award for Best Novel for her No Colder Place. The Washington Post has called her Bill Smith/Lydia Chin novels...a series to watch for....Booklist deemed Rozan....a major figure in contemporary mystery fiction...Now it's your turn—to discover one of fiction's major voices and to fall in love with a mystery of evocative atmosphere, engaging characters, and exquisite writing. It's Lydia Chin's turn to go underground as the Chinese-American P.I. investigates a case that strikes at the heart of Chinatown's dangerously shifting power structure. Four restaurant workers, including a union organizer, have disappeared, and the union's lawyer hires Lydia to find them. But when a bomb shatters the Chinese Restaurant Workers' Union headquarters, killing one of the missing men and injuring the lawyer, Lydia is summoned by the prime suspect, one of Chinatown's most powerful men, to continue the search—on his payroll. With backup from her partner Bill Smith, Lydia goes undercover as a dim sum waitress, slinging steamed dumplings while dodging a lethal conflict between the old and the new orders, and searching for the missing waiters and their deadly secret—before someone serves them their last supper

Bill Smith's country cabin in upstate New York is far from the city's savage streets—a retreat where a weary P.I. can play Mozart on his upright piano and let nature heal him. But when Eve Colgate, a local farmer and painter, asks him to find stolen items—six paintings which could reveal Eve's highly guarded thirty-year-old secret—he caves. When Smith's partner, Lydia Chin, comes in on the action, she brings along her cool courage and sharp mind. It's a simple case—until the runaway daughter of a hotshot politician and the murder of a local hood change the playing field. Now the stench of corruption fills this rural paradise, as Bill and Lydia scour through dangerous secrets and greedy corridors for the stone-cold truth...

S. J. Rozan is widely regarded as one of the finest crime writers to emerge in the past decade. Praised by critics and colleagues alike, her works have been finalists for most of the major awards and have won both the Shamus and the Anthony Awards for Best Novel. Now, with Reflecting the Sky, she has written her finest, most broad-ranging novel to date. Lydia Chin, a Chinese-American private investigator in her late twenties, is hired by Grandfather Gao, one of the most respected figures in New York City's Chinatown, for what appears to be a simple task. Lydia, along with her professional partner Bill Smith, is to fly to Hong Kong to deliver a family heirloom to the young grandson of a recently deceased colleague of Grandfather Gao. They arrive in Hong Kong safely but before they can deliver the heirloom, the grandson is kidnapped and two, separate ransom demands are made. While the family of the kidnapped boy tries to freeze them out, Lydia and Bill must quickly learn their way around a place where the rules are different, the stakes are high, and the cost of failure is too dire to imagine. Reflecting the Sky is a 2002 Edgar Award Nominee for Best Novel.

Private detective Bill Smith is hurtled headlong into the most provocative-and personal-case of his career when he receives a chilling late night telephone call from the NYPD, who are holding his fifteen-year-old nephew Gary. But before he can find out what's going on, Gary escapes Bill's custody and disappears into the dark and unfamiliar streets... Bill and his partner, Lydia Chin, try to find the missing teen and uncover what it is that has led him so far from home. Their search takes them to Gary's family in a small town in New Jersey, where they discover that one of Gary's classmates was murdered. Bill and Lydia delve into the crime-only to find it eerily similar to a decades-old murder-suicide... Now, with his nephew's future-and perhaps his very life-at stake, Bill must unravel a long-buried crime and confront the darkness of his own past... Winter and Night is the winner of the 2003 Edgar Award for Best Novel.

With The Shanghai Moon, S. J. Rozan returns to her award-winning, critically acclaimed, and much-loved characters Lydia Chin and Bill Smith in the first new novel in the series in seven years. Estranged for months from fellow P.I. Bill Smith, Chinese-American private investigator Lydia Chin is brought in by colleague and former mentor Joel Pilarsky to help with a case that crosses continents, cultures, and decades. In Shanghai, excavation has unearthed a cache of European jewelry dating back to World War II, when Shanghai was an open city providing safe haven for thousands of Jewish refugees. The jewelry, identifed as having belonged to one such refugee—Rosalie Gilder—was immediately stolen by a Chinese official who fled to New York City. Hired by a lawyer specializing in the recovery of Holocaust assets, Chin and Pilarsky are to find any and all leads to the missing jewels. However, Lydia soon learns that there is much more to the story than they've been told: The Shanghai Moon, one of the world's most sought after missing jewels, reputed to be worth millions, is believed to have been part of the same stash. Before Lydia can act on this new information, Joel Pilarsky is murdered, Lydia is fired from the case, and Bill Smith finally reappears on the scene. Now Lydia and Bill must unravel the truth about the Shanghai Moon and the events that surrounded its disappearance sixty years ago during the chaos of war and revolution, if they are to stop more killings and uncover the truth of what is going on today.

P.I. Bill Smith is sent on a high stakes chase when an electronically modified voice on his cell phone informs him that Lydia Chin, his occasional partner, has been kidnapped. Now if Bill wants to keep Lydia alive, he'll have to play an elaborate game of the kidnapper's devising. The first move sends him to an abandoned building where Bill finds the corpse of a small Chinese woman dressed like Lydia and the building being rapidly surrounded by police. Now Bill is on the run from the cops and in the worst trouble of his very troubled life. With the help of Lydia's hacker cousin Linus, and Linus' cohort Trella, Bill has to not only stay one step ahead of the cops, he has to uncover the secret behind the kidnapper's identity and the reason he's come after Bill, if he's to reach Lydia before it's too late.

"Rozan again proves that the private detective novel thrives in the 21st century." — Oline Cogdill, The Sun-Sentinel on On the Line American-Born Chinese PI Lydia Chin is called in on what appears to be a simple case. Jeff Dunbar, art world insider, wants her to track down a rumor. Contemporary Chinese painting is sizzling hot on the art scene and no one is hotter than Chau Chun, known as the Ghost Hero. A talented and celebrated ink painter, Chau's highly-prized work mixes classical forms and modern political commentary. The rumor of new paintings by Chau is shaking up the art world. There’s only one problem – Ghost Hero Chau has been dead for twenty years, killed in the 1989 Tianamen Square uprising. But not only is Ghost Hero Chau long dead, but Lydia’s client isn't who he claims to be either. And she’s not the only PI hired to look for these paintings. Lydia and her partner, Bill Smith, soon learn that someone else – Jack Lee: PI, art expert, and, like Lydia, American Born Chinese – is also on the case. What starts as rumors over new paintings by a dead artist quickly becomes something far more desperate – a high-stakes crisis the PI's will find themselves risking everything to resolve.

The latest Lydia Chin/Bill Smith mystery takes the acclaimed detective duo into the Deep South to investigate a murder within the Chinese community. The Most Southern Place on Earth: that’s what they call the Mississippi Delta. It’s not a place Lydia Chin, an American-born Chinese private detective from Chinatown, NYC, ever thought she’d have reason to go. But when her mother tells her a cousin Lydia didn’t know she had is in jail in Clarksdale, Mississippi—and that Lydia has to rush down south and get him out—Lydia finds herself rolling down Highway 61 with Bill Smith, her partner, behind the wheel. From the river levees to the refinement of Oxford, from old cotton gins to new computer scams, Lydia soon finds that nothing in Mississippi is as she expected it to be. Including her cousin’s legal troubles—or possibly even his innocence. Can she uncover the truth in a place more foreign to her than any she’s ever seen?

In the latest mystery from S. J. Rozan, Bill Smith and Lydia Chin must track down a serial killer stalking women in New York's contemporary art scene. Former client Sam Tabor, just out of Greenhaven after a five-year homicide stint, comes to Bill Smith with a strange request. A colossally talented painter whose parole was orchestrated by art world movers and shakers, Sam's convinced that since he's been out he's killed two women. He doesn't remember the killings but he wants Smith, one of the few people he trusts, to investigate and prove him either innocent or guilty. NYPD detective Angela Grimaldi thinks Sam's "a weirdo." Smith has no argument with diagnosed with a number of mental disorders over the years, Sam self-medicates with alcohol, loses focus (except when he's painting), and has few friends. But Smith doesn't think that adds up to serial killer. He enlists Lydia Chin to help prove it. Smith and Chin delve into the world surrounding Sam Tabor, including his brother, two NYPD detectives, and various other artists, dealers, collectors, curators, and art connoisseurs. No answers appear. Evidence is found and lost again. And more bodies turn up. Sam Tabor might be just a crazy artist. But someone is killing people in his orbit. If not Sam, who? Why? And who will be next?

The death of a powerful Chinatown crime boss thrusts private eye Lydia Chin and her partner Bill Smith into a world of double-dealing, subterfuge, murder, and—because this is New York City—real estate in this new mystery by Edgar Award-winning novelist S. J. Rozan. Choi has left the Tong headquarters building to his niece, who hires Lydia and her partner, Bill Smith, to accompany her to inspect it. The building is at the center of a tug-of-war between Chinatown preservation interests—including Lydia's brother Tim—and a real estate developer who's desperate to get his hands on it. When Lydia, Bill, and Choi's niece go to the building, they discover the Tong members are equally divided on the question of whether the niece should hold onto the building or sell it—and make them rich. Entering Choi's private living quarters, they find the murdered body of Choi's chief lieutenant. The battle for the building has begun. Can Lydia and Bill escape being caught in the crossfire?

The new crime novel from the award-winning S. J. Rozan, where private investigators Lydia Chin and Bill Smith find themselves thrust into the mystery behind the disappearance of the teenage son of the mayor of New York. In January, New York City inaugurates its first female mayor. In April, her son disappears. Called in by the mayor's chief aide—a former girlfriend of private investigator Bill Smith’s—to find the missing fifteen-year-old, Bill and his partner, Lydia Chin, are told the boy has run away. Neither the press nor the NYPD know that he’s missing, and the mayor wants him back before a headstrong child turns into a political catastrophe. But as Bill and Lydia investigate, they turn up more questions than answers. Why did the boy leave? Who else is searching for him, and why? What is his twin sister hiding? Then a teen is found dead and another is hit by gunfire. Are these tragedies related to each other, and to the mayor's missing son? In a desperate attempt to find the answer to the boy's disappearance before it's too late, Bill and Lydia turn to the only contacts they think will be able to help: the neighborhood crime bosses who are the real ‘mayors’ of New York.