I stumbled onto Ian Hamilton's books after a Canadian reviewer who I follow said that the Ava Lee books and the Uncle Chow Tung books were 'zero-risk' reads that she knew she would always enjoy. As the Uncle Chow Tung books are a spin-off from the Ava Lee series, I decided to start with the first Ava Lee book, 'The Water Rat Of Wanchai' (released in the UK under the awful title of 'The Deadly Touch Of The Tigress'). Published in 2011, it won the Best First Novel Arthur Ellis Award (now known as the Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence).

As soon as I started it, I knew I was in for a treat. This was a book about a forensic accountant that felt both credible AND exciting. That's not an easy thing to achieve.

It may be an odd thing to say about a thriller but I found the start of the book, when Ava Lee was uncovering the scam and following the money, relaxing. I enjoyed slipping into the international business world of the Chinese diaspora. It's a world that I've only seen from the fringes but what I have seen made Ian Hamilton's descriptions feel solid and believable.

I loved the small insights into Chinese culture, seen through the eyes of Ava Lee, a Chinese Canadian woman who is as comfortable doing business in Hong Kong, Bangkok or Singapore as she is in Toronto, Seattle or New York.

Ava is a wonderful creation. On first meeting, she seems harmless: small, quiet, smart without being showy, conservatively dressed, scrupulously polite and effortlessly attractive. It takes a while for people to realize that she is a powerful woman who is focused, persistent, talented, physically dangerous and a ruthless risk-taker who will do whatever it takes to win. I enjoyed watching her work her solve problems, especially when the problem-solving involved figuring out how to overcome people more powerful than she is.

Forensic accounting doesn't sound like a risky business but when the task is to recover five million dollars from a criminal who has taken refuge in a failed State in South America where he has bought himself protection from powerful men, unconventional approaches are needed, dangerous alliances have to be made, deception is the preferred strategy and violence is always a tactical option.

The tension in the last twenty per cent of the book was palpable and had a heist movie feel to it. Ava was in danger and was no longer in control of events. I couldn't see how she was going to get out of the mess she was in but part of my enjoyment came from my confidence that she'd come up with something clever and risky that I hadn't thought of.

I want to spend more time following Ava around so I was happy to see that there are another fifteen books in the series. I'll be reading the second book, 'The Disciple Of Las Vegas', next month. ( )

I thoroughly enjoyed this book about a forensic accountant. I’ll definitely be reading more of this series. Unfortunately they are hard to find and/or expensive here in Australia so I’m going to start with inter-library loans and see how far I can get. ( )

I started to read this book because I couldn’t recall ever having read a crime series that had a forensic accountant as the main protagonist, and a female one at that.

This character just grated on my nerves from the very first, and I’m not sure if it was the intention of the Author to make her dislikeable or was just the way things turned out in the end. She is rich, as we are constantly reminded whenever possible, only likes the best of everything and was an avid coffee drinker, like all the other characters in this novel. As a female lead character she is not the strong independent woman I was hoping for; the kind that inspires other women to reach their full potential. In fact she is quite the opposite, she comes out of the page as being some sort of superwoman that can do anything, have anyone and anything she likes. This in itself is not a bad thing, but the way in which she is written could possibly make her an intimidating character to those women readers who are not supremely confident in their own skin and lives and, in my opinion this is something no Author should do to their readers, make them feel less than they are. In an effort to make her interesting she is Chinese-Canadian, although how this could redeem her flaws I am still not sure.

The coffee company Starbucks was mentioned so many times in this book that I broke off to look and see if it had been published through some program they funded. Another disappointment, apart from the obviously brand push, was that there is actually very little forensic accounting in this book, and what small amount there is takes place in a whole 5 or 6 pages. Combine these points with flat and uninteresting language and you have a book that really does not deliver for me, and this is the reason behind by 2 thumbs rating.

Given that this is marketed as an international thriller, I failed to get the thrill from the book that was hinted at and, although a taste of each country visited in the storyline was given, it just wasn’t enough to make this a series I would want to read anymore of.


Originally reviewed on: http://catesbooknuthut.com/2014/11/05/the-water-rat-of-wanchai-ava-lee-1-ian-ham...





This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
( )

This book was fairly suspenseful, full of exotic locations and unusual characters, many of whom were slimy or scary. Unlike some of the comments here, there was absolutely no Starbucks in the entire book, although the protagonist is a coffee junkie. Neither did I note any obsession with clothing types or labels. Huh. It was an enjoyable, quick read and I am already going for the next one. Worth it. ( )

Ava Lee is an unlikely hero: a clever, female, Chinese-Canadian forensic accountant, adept at martial arts. Basically, she is a large dollar debt collector and works with her "uncle" in Hong Kong.

In this first book in a series, she is seeking to recover $5 million stolen from a Chinese family that financed a seafood supplier. Her travels and job take her to many dangerous spots, providing a setting for her formidable negotiating and fighting skills. She also generates leads by masquerading as various governmental officials or feigning as a Triad member. Look forward to reading the next one in this series. ( )