The eighth novel in the Ava Lee series finds Ava caught in a labyrinth of high-level political corruption.
Ava is in Shanghai for the launch of the PÖ clothing line. She has invited Xu, and over the course of the glitzy event and a late-night dinner, she detects a certain hesitancy in him. He later confides that the Tsai family, headed by Tsai Lian, the governor of Jiangsu Province and a “princeling” — he is the son of a general who was on the Long March with Mao and a member of China’s power elite — is trying to force him and his triad organization back into the drug business. Xu is already paying millions of dollars a year to various Tsai businesses, but the family wants more and thinks the new venture can deliver it. Xu believes this move would lead to his eventual destruction and feels he has nowhere to turn. If he opposes them, they will crush him. If he goes along with them, he thinks that inevitably the police and military will hunt him down.
Ava sets out to help Xu deter the Tsai family. As she digs into the breadth and depth of the family’s wealth and corruption, she gets caught up in a huge tangled web, extending all the way to the U.S. and the U.K., where it reaches the top echelons of political power.
…like the best series writers – Ian Rankin and Peter Robinson come to mind – Hamilton manages to…keep the Ava Lee books fresh…a compulsive read, a page-turner of the old school…The Princeling of Nanjing is a welcome return of an old favourite, and bodes well for future books.
…one of those grip tight novels that makes one read “just one more chapter” and you discover it’s 3am. The novel is built on complicated webs artfully woven into clear, magnetic story-telling. Author Ian Hamilton delivers the intrigue within complex and relentless webs in high style and once again proves that everyone, once in their lives, needs an Ava Lee at their backs.
the reader is offered plenty of Ava in full flower as the Chinese-Canadian glamour puss who happens to be gay, whip smart and unafraid of whatever dangers come her way.
Hamilton uses his people and plot to examine Chinese class and power structures that open opportunities for massive depravities and corruptions
