Ava Lee: The Triad Years : A Series by Ian Hamilton (House of Anansi Press)
Ava Lee isn’t the kind of woman to work her way up a corporate ladder, although her skill as a forensic accountant would guarantee a swift ascent. Her university degree has given her a marketable career but she’s more devoted to the practice of bak mei, a subtle and deadly form of martial arts that’s taught her how to kill with one of her knuckles.
While working at a Canadian firm, Ava meets an elderly man from Hong Kong whom everyone calls Uncle. Impressed by her accounting talents, he offers her the chance to join forces with him as a “debt collector.”
As humble as this sounds,the work actually involves the recovery of missing money--and lots of it. Uncle is only interested in jobs that involve sums of at least twenty million dollars US and his fee is 30% of what’s recovered, which in one case brought him one-third of 80 million dollars. His background is shadowy and the people he employs are rough around the edges. He needs Ava’s beauty and professional polish to get the jobs that will be most lucrative, and Ava is drawn to the variety and challenge of the work that Uncle can provide.
A deep affinity begins to take root between the septuagenarian who once swam from the coast of China to begin a new life in Hong Kong and the young Chinese Canadian woman who has a comfortable existence in Toronto but welcomes difficult jobs that come with a threat of danger. Uncle discovers that Ava can hold her own against the burliest goons that are brought to bear against her and Ava finds a smart and kindly mentor whom her distant father has failed to be.
A woman with her own style, Ava begins each job dressed in crisp Brooks Brothers shirts, black linen slacks or pencil skirts, and conservative black pumps, enlivened by jade cufflinks, a simple gold chain that holds a small crucifix, a Cartier Tank Francaise watch, and the ivory chignon pin that has become her good luck charm. These details are far from trivial. The clothes aren’t just a uniform, they’re armor, in good taste with a dash of luxury, but unobtrusive. When Ava’s dressed for work, nobody can guess that she’s also dressed to kill, professionally and literally. Small and slender, Ava is easily underestimated and she uses this as one of her primary weapons.
Uncle finds the jobs, through contacts from a subterranean life that Ava never asks about. She’s the one who’s the public face of their enterprise, who can gain entry to the highest levels of any world she needs to access, but who can also render an assailant helpless with one quick and strategically placed blow. Men hold no menace for Ava, nor any attraction either. She prefers women.
Her adventures become addictive and luckily there are many of them, recounted in fourteen books to date, beginning with The Water Rat of Wanchai and most recently found in The Diamond Queen of Singapore. The earliest volumes slowly unveil the world of Hong Kong’s triads, complete with a flow chart of their structure. Within that framework are detailed looks at the business of art forgery, the gambling worlds of Las Vegas and Macau, international money laundering, and the complexities of the seafood industry. All of these settings involve sums of money that are almost unimaginably huge, a whole lot of violence, and a staggering amount of travel. Ava Lee books first class air tickets the way other people jump on a city bus.
Hong Kong, Metro Manila, Surabaya, London, Shanghai, Las Vegas--wherever she goes, Ava’s destinations, along with the meals she has when she gets there, are described in mouthwatering detail, giving Lonely Planet guides a run for their money. A walk though one of those cities is charted carefully enough that any reader could follow in Ava’s footsteps and reach her destination--and because Ian Hamilton is such a good writer, many of them are going to want to do that.
Hamilton became an author after a long and varied career in over thirty different countries, with positions ranging from journalist to Canadian consul to international businessman whose specialty was runnning seafood companies. Obviously his journalism training in taking notes has served him well as a novelist but his talent goes way beyond that of a painstaking observer. His novels abound in descriptions that are both witty and evocative. “He looked like a garden gnome in a suit,” is the way he introduces one of his most repulsive characters and he pinpoints the prevailing odor of Southeast Asia with “The air was humid, thick with the smell of cooking oil, rotting vegetation, exhaust fumes, and garbage.” (Mmmm, I can smell it now.)
“People always do the right thing for the wrong reason,” Uncle frequently reminds Ava. It’s certainly true when it comes to this series. One book picked up to kill time in an airport is going to take the reader on a multi-volumed literary rollercoaster ride, one that’s going to give them more pleasure (and information) than they ever expected to find. Enlaced within Ava’s adventures are facts: the splendor of Surabaya’s Majapahit Hotel (“better than Raffles”), how long it takes for flunitrazepam to kick in (popularly known as roofies), who the Ndrangheta are and where they come from, the delights to be found in the Arab quarter in of Surabaya, which kretek (Indonesian clove cigarettes) are the most expensive and the best, the importance of an Italian collar on a well-made shirt--and all of that in a single book (The Scottish Banker of Surabaya. Perhaps none of these tidbits are essential to know, but they open new windows into unknown corners, and that’s indisputably essential.
However these books come with a caveat. Anyone who ventures into Ava Lee’s territory will probably end up with her primary addiction--cups of Starbucks Via Instant Coffee. While her preferences for Cartier, Shanghai Tang, and five-star hotels may be out of reach for most of us, Via can be found all over the world at prices anybody can afford. Prepare to succumb to the inevitable. ~Janet Brown