Ian Hamilton

In The Disciple of Las Vegas, forensic accountant Ava Lee is hired by the richest man in the Philippines to recover $50 million from a Canadian land swindle. With the billionaire's reputation on the line, she follows the money from Vancouver to Las Vegas, to the Costa Rican accounts of the Moneida, a First Nations band that owns The River, a poker web site. After uncovering an illegal online gambling ring, she confronts one of the world poker greats, David "The Disciple" Douglas, and his partner, Jeremy Ashton. Meanwhile, Jackie Leung, an old target of Uncle's and Ava's, has made it rich. He wants revenge, and he's going after Ava to get it.

An Ava Lee Novel

The Disciple of Las Vegas

In this next installment of the addictive and award-winning Ava Lee series, Ava uncovers an international terrorism conspiracy rooted in a college in Tawi-Tawi.

The Imam of Tawi-Tawi

The fifth installment in the wildly popular Ava Lee series exposes the dark world of money laundering and the Italian mob. Ava begins an investigation into what she thinks is a Ponzi scheme. The trail leads her to a bank in Indonesia that is run by a Scot, but in actuality is a front for an elaborate money-laundering operation for Italian mobsters. The relationship between Ava and the Scotsman turns nasty and personal. Meanwhile, Uncle’s health problems become apparent...

The Scottish Banker of Surabaya

Ava Lee is a petite young Chinese-Canadian forensic accountant who works for an elderly Hong Kong-based 'Uncle'. In tracking millions of dollars across continents the stakes are often high, sometimes violent and always shady, but Ava Lee's razor-sharp intelligence and unorthodox rules of engagement allow her to succeed where traditional methods have failed. This is a novel full of suspense, with an equally fascinating heroine.

The Deadly Touch of the Tigress

Ava must find a way to help her half-brother Michael who is in trouble because of a multi-million-dollar real-estate deal gone wrong in Macau.

The Red Pole of Macau

In The Wild Beasts of Wuhan, Uncle and Ava are summoned by Wong Changxing, "The Emperor of Hubei" and one of the most powerful men in China, when he discovers that the Fauvist paintings he recently acquired are in fact forgeries. Ava uncovers a ring of fraudulent art dealers and follows their twisted trail to Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Dublin, London, and New York. But the job is further complicated by Wong's second wife, the cunning and seductive May Ling, who threatens to interfere in Ava's investigation. Will Ava find the perpetrators and get the Wongs' money back? Or will May Ling get to them first . . .

The Wild Beasts of Wuhan

In The Mountain Master of Sha Tin, Ava Lee becomes embroiled in a violent triad war between two feuding gangs vying for control of the Wanchai territory in Hong Kong.

The Mountain Master of Sha Tin

To protect the woman she loves, Ava Lee must infiltrate the seedy world of the Syndicate -- a cabal of senior officials in the Chinese film industry that seeks to blackmail and extort young film stars for money and sex.

The Goddess of Yantai

New-World China meets Old-World Italy, as Ava investigates the dark side of the glamourous world of fashion in the latest installment of the Ava Lee Novels. Ava attends London Fashion Week for the launch of the PÖ fashion line, one of the major investments she and her partners in the Three Sisters — May Ling Wong and Amanda Yee — have made over the past year. The show is a success, but perhaps too much of one. It attracts the attention of Dominic Ventola, the principal partner in the luxury fashion conglomerate VLG. When VLG offers to buy the Three Sisters’ stake in the company, Ava and her partners decline. A few days later, PÖ comes under attack in the fashion media and a large part of their customer base begins to abandon them. With the help of Xu, Ava uncovers the dark and complex dynamics between East and West in the global fashion industry, eventually leading to a confrontation between two of the world’s biggest crime syndicates.

The Triad Years

The Couturier of Milan

The first book in a gripping new Ava Lee spin-off series featuring fan-favourite Uncle Chow Tung and his ascendancy to the head of the Triad gang in Fanling. Hong Kong, 1969. The Dragon Head of the Fanling Triad has died and there is a struggle to replace him among senior members of the gang. Normally, the Deputy Mountain Master is next in line, but this one is weak and ineffectual and has only survived because of the protection of the Dragon Head. Up to this point, the Fanling Triad has operated in relative isolation from neighbouring gangs, but the Dragon Head's death has drawn attention to the area -- and to its wealth. Other gangs start to make threatening moves and it's obvious to the senior members of the Fanling Triad that they need a leader who can fend off the threats, unite the membership, and maintain their prosperity. There are several candidates. The least conspicuous is the White Paper Fan, their young administrator. His name is Chow Tung, but many of those who work with him already refer to him as "Uncle" . . .

Fate

The prequel to the wildly popular Ava Lee series. Young Ava Lee is a forensic accounting who has just opened her own private firm. One of her clients, Hedrick Lo, has been swindled of more than a million dollars by a Chinese importer named Johnny Kung. Desperate, Lo persuades Ava to find and retrieve the monies owed. Ava goes to Hong Kong, where she plunges into the dangerous underground collection business and meets a man who will forever change her life . . .

The Ava Lee Prequel

The Dragon Head of Hong Kong

The seventh novel in the Ava Lee series finds Ava caught up in the election for the chairmanship of the Triad Societies. It’s been three months since Uncle’s passing, and Ava is finally ready to begin her new life as a partner with May Ling Wong and her sister-in-law Amanda in their Three Sisters venture capital firm. Ava travels to Shanghai to hear a pitch on a new investment possibility: the creation of a fashion line by Clark and Gillian Po. She also meets with the mysterious Xu, a young man Uncle had been mentoring and who is the head of the triad in Shanghai. Xu makes an audacious business proposal that she and May Ling are compelled to consider. Meanwhile, separately and privately, he confides to Ava that he intends to run for the chairmanship of the Triad Societies and attempts to recruit her as his adviser. Against her will, Ava becomes enmeshed in triad warfare and her future is threatened...

The King of Shanghai

The sixth installment in the wildly popular Ava Lee series from Arthur Ellis Award winner Ian Hamilton. Ava has been in Hong Kong looking after Uncle. She has also set up an investment company with May Ling Wong and her sister-in-law, Amanda Yee. One of their first investments — a furniture company owned by two sisters in Kota Kinabalu, Borneo — runs into immediate problems with a Dutch customer. Ava goes to the Netherlands to investigate, but her life is threatened when she is confronted by a gang of local thugs in Borneo. Out of the shadows comes a mysterious man from Shanghai...

The Two Sisters of Borneo

Winner of the Arthur Ellis Award for Best First Novel and named a Quill and Quire Book of the Year and Amazon.ca Editors' Pick Ava Lee is a young Chinese-Canadian forensic accountant who works for an elderly Hong Kong-based "Uncle," who may or may not have ties to the Triads. At 115 lbs., she hardly seems a threat. But her razorsharp intellect and resourcefulness allows her to succeed where traditional methods have failed. In The Water Rat of Wanchai, Ava travels across continents to track $5 million owed by a seafood company. But it's in Guyana where she meets her match: Captain Robbins, a huge hulk of a man and godfather-like figure who controls the police, politicians, and criminals alike. In exchange for his help, he decides he wants a piece of Ava's $5 million action and will do whatever it takes to get his fair share... In the first of the series, Ian Hamilton introduces the reader to one of crime fiction's most unique and compelling heroines, and uncovers the dark machinations of the global shadow economy.

The Water Rat of Wanchai

In the latest thrilling novel in the Ava Lee series, Ava is forced to revisit her past as she confronts one of Singapore's most powerful families.

The Diamond Queen of Singapore

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.

The Princeling of Nanjing

Against Oblivion

Collects Ian Hamilton's critical writings, including pieces on Sylvia Plath, Robert Frost, John Updike, and George Orwell

Essays And Reviews, 1968-1993

Walking Possession

Alan Jenkins

A professional man of letters - critic, editor, biographer - though never a professional poet, Ian Hamilton (1938-2001) referred to his poems as 'miraculous lyrical arrivals', and he bided their time with exemplary patience and humility. His widely praised first collection, The Visit, published by Faber in 1970, was incorporated into Fifty Poems in 1988, itself expanded to Sixty Poems in 1998. In a preface to the former collection, he wrote: 'Fifty poems in twenty-five years: not much to show for half a lifetime, you might think. And in certain moods, I would agree.' Readers of Hamilton's condensed and immaculate oeuvre have felt otherwise: the poems of his youth and middle years (there was to be no opportunity for a late flowering) acquired talismanic significance for his contemporaries, and their combination of terseness and emotional intensity continues to set an example to younger poets. Edited by Alan Jenkins, this authoritative Collected Poems contains all of the poetry that Ian Hamilton chose to publish, together with a small number of uncollected and unpublished poems; it also supplies an illuminating introduction, and succinctly helpful apparatus. The result is an edition whose thoroughness and tact are themselves a moving tribute, restoring to view one of the most disinctive bodies of work in twentieth-century English poetry.

Ian Hamilton Collected Poems

The story of Hollywood has often been told from the point of view of the stars, the directors, the tycoons, but not until now from the point of view of the gallery of writers who helped shape it, including Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Chandler, and many others.

Ian Hamilton

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