Ava Lee series ends with fun twist
Author wraps detective yarn after 10 books
The Imam of Tawi-Tawi Ian Hamilton House of Anansi Spiderline
Ava Lee is Chinese-Canadian. She’s chic, in her mid30s and massively wealthy thanks to her work — mainly in Asia — as a martial-artstrained forensic accountant retrieving stolen or misappropriated millions from dangerous people.
And she’s lesbian.
It’s hard to conjure a less likely person to investigate an isolated school, in the southernmost, predominantly Muslim part of the Philippines, suspected of being a training ground for potential jihadis.
And so it’s odd that when she’s asked to look into activities at Zakat College on the island of Tawi-Tawi, neither she nor any of the men seeking her help raise those questions of suitability. It seems a haunting sort of gap.
The Imam of Tawi-Tawi is the 10th in Canadian Ian Hamilton’s Ava Lee series, exotic and flamboyant novels that tend not to cling too closely to credibility at the best of times. But they’re fast-paced, smoothly written and fun in an often-violent sort of way. Plus, they make accounting glamorous, complicated and dangerous.
In this outing, the man who approaches Ava for help is Chang Wang, an associate of the dodgy Filipino billionaire Tommy Ordonez, for whom Ava once recovered $50 million from a land deal gone badly awry.
She’s initially reluctant to investigate Zakat College. Recently launched into a secret relationship with a top Chinese actress and involved in the business pursuits of her Three Sisters investment enterprise, she’s been shifting her career away from pursuing ill-gotten millions.
But she also keeps in mind the importance of helpful contacts in Asia, including Chang Wang, Ordonez and the powerful Filipino senator who outlines the Tawi-Tawi problem for her.
The men, it turns out, own vast pineapple plantations in the southern Philippines. They have a useful detente with the Muslim Brotherhood there that no one wants disturbed by the possible presence of jihadis in training.
The Brotherhood is specifically worried that if the Philippine government hears the Zakat College rumours, its forces will swoop into the region and take the opportunity to brutalize its Muslim residents in general.
The Imam of Tawi-Tawi is clever, not least in the parallels it creates between extremist Islam and extremist Christianity. And it has one of the best plot twists of modern crime fiction, though it may take a little patience to get there. The finale is both a dazzler and ominously, scarily plausible.