Okay, so I love this series featuring forensic accountant Ava Lee. Ava Lee lives in Toronto and collects debts for a living. This involves lots of travel, bags of stamina, and oodles of personality. But I must admit Ms. Lee shocked me with her ruthless intent on this one. She actually commanded a henchman to proceed with a gruesome threat she'd made to...a ruthless con man. That cool distance in her calculation had always made her seem scary and thrilling but when one actually witnesses her threat made real, it is far less appealing and far more lethal. Now that she has drawn blood, we find ourselves as readers firming up, standing back, calculating, cautious. No longer just lighthearted fun, this makes us ask ourselves what we would have done, or what we would have had our character do. We have to justify following her avenging course.
The impingement on our moral sense carries throughout the book, and I find myself distancing myself from her. I read this series out of order, so I still had a glib, happy-go-lucky feeling reading book #3, The The Wild Beasts of Wuhan. I would have to reasses my take on that book in light of this one.
In this, an online gambling concern manages to tweak the system so that the owners of the site can view competitors cards and win money illegally. One of the losers happens to have a rich uncle who hires Ava to get his money back. So far, all of the books in this series have more than held my interest--I am intrigued with the legal and moral complications of forensic accounting.
My reviews of the other Ian Hamilton books:
The Chow Tung Series
Fate (Uncle Chow Tung #1)
Foresight (Uncle Chow Tung #2)
The Ava Lee Series
The Water Rat of Wanchai (Ava Lee #1)
The Disciple of Las Vegas (Ava Lee #2)
The Wild Beasts of Wuhan (Ava Lee #3)
The Red Pole of Macau (Ava Lee #4)
The Scottish Banker of Surabaya (Ava Lee #5)
The Two Sisters of Borneo (Ava Lee #6)
The King of Shanghai (Ava Lee #7)
The Princeling of Nanjing (Ava Lee #8)
The Couturier of Milan (Ava Lee #9)
The Imam of Tawi-Tawi (Ava Lee #10)
The Goddess of Yantai (Ava Lee #11)
The Mountain Master of Sha Tin (Ava Lee #12)
The Diamond Queen of Singapore (Ava Lee #13)
You can buy this book here:
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