[ATDrake]

Originally Posted by CRussel

I've also got the first of the Ava Lee books, The Water Rat of Wancha, and I really want to give this series a try.

It may be a bit of an acquired taste, but they're rather enjoyable books, IMHO. I just finished #2-4 which I bought at Kobo during the recent sale (couponable for Canadians! and they lowered the price even more right after I paid for them!), and I'm about to head out later to the not-so-local library to get #5-6 off their shelves.

Anyway, read Ian Hamilton's The Disciple of Las Vegas, The Wild Beasts of Wuhan, and The Red Pole of Macau, in his Ava Lee, Intrepid Globe-Trotting Stolen Money Recovering Forensic Accountant series, in quick succession.

One of the things I like about this series is that even though Ava's forensic accountant job works out to being a quasi-legal debt collector for stolen money, it varies how the money was lost and in which way, which in turn requires varying her approach to tracing it down and trying to get it back. This gives it a bit of variety and makes the series feel less formulaic than it otherwise might.

So far, there's been real estate fraud, art forgeries, gambling, food supply shenanigans (I learned a lot more about how packagers lie and cheat on prawn weight than I'd ever thought I would), etc.

As well, Ava's continuing interpersonal relationships, both on her friends and family side, and her working connections, continue to develop, adding a sense of continuity to the books which while the cases can kind of be read standalone without spoiling details of the individual whodunnits, they really do flow into each other and should be read in order (minus the prequel novella, which was written later and is standalone enough to be slotted in between any of the regular novels).

Once again, these are investigative mysteries rather than murder ones, although there's a certain amount of violence that goes with the job, which looks like it might be escalating as Ava keeps going after more and more potentially dangerous fish, with possibly a gradual corruption of her originally fairly pure helping-the-cheated-helpless purposes in store. I'm really interested to see where her character development arc is going.

Partially as a result of this, some of the tactics Ava resorts to become greyer and darker, and she's encountering more in the way of moral not-quite-dilemma, but certain contemplation and reflectiveness as to cost of what she's doing in order to accomplish what's going to be done. Also, she's becoming less insulated from certain things which she previously had been due to "Uncle"'s mentorship and running interference and is beginning to have to deal with having to make and maintain more useful connections of her own, or deal with the consequences of not doing so.

I've mentioned before that Hamilton tends to write her as a bit of a Modesty Blaise-ish super-gifted hyper-competent favourite action heroine at times, and he does. But Ava does make real failings, with real mistakes that come from a variety of reasonably realistic sources, such as overestimating her own capability, misreading situations, underestimating an opponent's resources, etc. without feeling too much like they're contrivances meant to Make Our Heroine's Life Difficult For Two Chapters Before The Victorious Resolution.

As always, the books are chock-full of exotic travel destinations (not just the ones you'd expect from a Chinese-Canadian forensic accountant doing debt collection for a Hong Kong-based entity, but also as far afield as Denmark and the Faroe Islands, which I quite enjoyed because I have this inordinate fondness for cultures which produce dragon boats, so I really like seeing the Nordic countries as well as the East Asian ones), and very many observations on culture and food, which may or may not be to the Gentle Reader's taste.

Medium-firm recommend if you think you'd like this kind of thing. It's pretty refreshing to have a non-murder (at least, not deliberately murdered for the purposes of investigating the murder; why don't we just pretend those dead bodies never happened…) mystery series where there actually is a real investigation and legwork procedure for tracking down where the money went and how best to get it back, in addition to the more action thriller-y moments which I should add, do not dominate the books.

I'm really liking these, but they're a bit unusual for their crossover genre, IMHO, not being action-y enough to constitute exotic adventure thrillers, but at the same time not murder-y enough to be the typical sort of sleuth crime mysteries. And they're also kind of travel porn, so YMMV.