I picked this up in a small book store on Pender Island in British Columbia while looking for a vacation read. I didn't know what the Arthur Ellis award was, but I figured it couldn't hurt to read a pulp novel that had won an award of some sort.This isn't a traditional mystery novel and the protagonist is not a traditional detective. Ava Lee is a young forensic accountant from Toronto but she doesn't solve murders or bank robberies and she doesn't work with the police. Instead she tracks down lost money for people who have gotten involved with shady business dealings. Her employer is a mysterious "Uncle" based in Hong Kong, who has a great many personal and professional connections. He sends assignments to Ava and she then tracks down the culprits, convincing them to return the money with which they absconded. The two of them take a commission from each recovered sum. Ava is Canadian, Catholic, lesbian and an expert practitioner of an obscure Chinese martial art form that, despite her diminutive size, makes her nearly invincible in a one-on-one match-up. She travels the world with confidence and ease and thus the book feels more like a James Bond story channeled by way of a Hong Kong action flick. Her moral compass is not traditional, but it is consistent. She is loyal to certain people and ideas, but her methods of achieving justice are unconventional.In this debut novel, a friend of Uncle's has gotten a raw deal on some seafood. Around $5 million has been siphoned off and now the business partners have disappeared into the wind. Ava must leave Toronto to travel to Hong Kong, Thailand, Guyana and eventually the British Virgin Islands. Her biggest problem does not come from the businessmen who tried to take off with the money but when she partners with Captain Robbins, a godfather-like figure who seems to run the country of Guyana entirely, to get things moving there. Once he discovers who she is and what she is after, Robbins decides that he needs to be a FULL partner and get a larger sum of the recovered money. And he is willing to use some pretty brutal techniques to get what he wants.I enjoyed this book. It is generally fast-paced and cinematic and although a lot happens plot-wise, it does not seem unnecessarily complicated as some mystery or adventure novels can be. The characters are actually pretty well-drawn throughout and I believed most of them. Hamilton does suffer from one of the common issues of young novelists however: he seems to think that by providing brand names and detailed descriptions of daily routines - changes of clothes, making coffee, reading the newspaper, working out - he is making the novel more "vivid." But at times it just slows things down or causes the reader to roll their eyes.But that's a relatively minor quibble and I expect that Hamilton will get better at this as he writes more. There are more books in this series now, and given that the preview chapter from #2 picks up mere hours after this novel is over, I might be tempted to read more of them. If you like crime fiction and/or globe-trotting action/adventure tales, this is a quick, entertaining read. OK, so I started reading this book and almost immediately thought that the writing style was clumsy, think Dan Brown but better. However, also, like Mr. Brown, Mr. Hamilton develops a compelling and engaging plot line that gets you wanting to keep reading. The character of Ava Lee, forensic accountant with deadly martial arts skills is also a very clever invention. I was hooked and went on to read the rest of the series one after the other. I would have rated this book as 4 stars but for my complaint in sentence one. My wife says that the silly repeated details about what Ava wears is a sop to the women readers of this series. Whatever.Interesting plots and locations and the character of Ava Lee continues to grow in each book. Recommended.
Do You like book The Deadly Touch Of The Tigress (2011)?
a good read by a Canadian author - looking forward to reading more of these
—wh400
Absolutely wonderful!! I will be looking for others in the series.
—phoenix
