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THE PRINCELING OF NANJING By Ian Hamilton Spiderline, 475 pages, $19.95
Readers familiar with Ian Hamilton’s previous eight thrillers in the Ava Lee series know that our girl Ava is an ace forensic accountant on an international scale, but none of us would have dreamed she would set out in The Princeling of Nanjing to bring down one of the richest, most powerful and corrupt families in all of China.
The tale unfolds mostly in Shanghai where Ava takes on the Tsai family, a bunch that includes several billionaires, the governor of a large province and an ancestor who trudged beside Mao on the historic long march to communist rule. Thrilling as this may sound, Ava’s struggle with the amoral Tsais is almost exclusively a matter of financial manoeuvring.
In past Ava Lee books, physical danger and handto-hand combat come regularly into play. Ava’s not afraid of the former and formidable at the latter. But aside from a handful of vaguely stressful episodes and a very short encounter in which Ava dukes it out with three menacing secret policemen, The Prince
ling of Nanjing is almost exclusively an intellectual exercise.
More than anything, the book reads like a casebook in Chinese business corruption. To be sure, it’s a stylishly written casebook, as readable as the other novels in the series, and 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.
EVEN THE DEAD By Benjamin Black Henry Holt, 304 pages, $31.50
Benjamin Black is the pen name adopted by the Man Bookerwinning Irish author John Banville when he writes novels in his crime series. It’s not as if Banville is slumming since his crime novels, while not long on mystery, are rewarding for their complex characters and engrossing evocation of 1950s Ireland as a country of “secrets and lies.” As before, Black’s two sleuth figures are Quirke, the Dublin pathologist, and Hackett, the police inspector. This time, they’re on to the murder of a bright young civil servant and the disappearance of his pregnant girlfriend. While the solution gets into well worn territory, the sleuthing remains honest and rewarding.
ORPHAN X By Greg Hurwitz Minotaur, 368 pages, $29.99
At age 12, orphaned Evan Smoak is drafted by the American government into “a full-deniability, antiseptic operation run off a black budget.” In plainer English, Evan takes up a career rescuing the innocent victims of very bad guys whom he kills (the bad guys, that is), all done at the highest level of sophistication in weaponry and other hardware. But what happens when someone as skilled at killing as Evan is comes after him? And who is the adversary? What’s his motivation? Hurwitz is a veteran at writing this expert brand of thriller, the kind where the personal relationships remain human but the action is otherworldly.
HIS RIGHT HAND By Mette Ivie Harrison Soho, 352 pages, $26.95
When a murdered body turns up in a crime novel and the body is revealed to be that of a married man who hasn’t quite completed the transgendering process from life as a woman, we’ve got something intriguing on our hands. When the same thing happens in Mette Ivie Harrison’s very readable second novel, the situation is more like a disaster. That’s because Harrison’s books are set among the Mormons of Draper, Utah. Harrison, like her characters, is Mormon, and we can assume she gets it right when she presents in painful and occasionally comic detail the turmoil following on the event that so challenges Mormon theology.