Ava Lee – #0.5 + 1 : The Dragon Head of Hong Kong + The Water Rat of Wanchai

I think it was on CBC radio that I first heard about this Canadian series (of 13 volumes!). The person who introduced it found it fascinating and highly entertaining. Several years later, I decided to ask my grandmother to give the first volume as a gift to my boyfriend, so we could read it together. It's a brick, but bricks don't scare me. Had I known, I might have let myself be scared.

Summary

Ava Lee is a young Chinese-American forensic accountant. She weighs only 115 pounds, but her mastery of martial arts makes her formidable. Her job: to recover the money her clients have lost to high-caliber fraudsters. The amounts are staggering. The clients are desperate. And they know they have no chance of getting their money back using conventional methods.

In the antepisode The Dragon Head of Hong Kongwe meet Ava Lee, who has just started her company. One of her customers was stolen a million dollars by a Chinese importer, so she goes to Hong Kong to recover the money. She then meets Uncle, with whom she will develop a long and fruitful partnership.

In The Water Rat of WanchaiAva Lee is asked to recover about $5 million that a seafood company owes its client. She travels to Guyana, where she has no choice but to enlist the help of a highly dangerous and highly influential man, who is willing to help her in her mission in exchange for a large fee. She is normally good enough to get what she wants. But with him, and in this country, she's not the one with the big stick...

Impressions

The premise is exciting. I really like the James Bond movies, and I was pretty excited to follow a similar female character. I liked the technical aspects of the book. At one point, you learn all sorts of things about the seafood packaging industry, and I found that quite fascinating.

But the book has some major flaws. The characters are not endearing. Ava Lee's client in The Water Rat of Wanchai is whiny and rather unpleasant, so you don't particularly want him to get his money back. The people she meets are either bandits or bankers, so the level of sympathy you can feel for them is pretty low. And Ava Lee, who has the most potential to be interesting, is basically not much better than the evil fraudsters she takes on: she tortures and threatens without remorse or finesse. We end up wondering why we're supposed to care about what she does.

The story itself is not very interesting. One would expect twists and turns and impossible situations from which the heroine would save herself in extremis, but in fact her operations go quite well, she is never in serious danger. We simply follow the steps, one after the other, for almost 600 pages that end up looking the same.

And I observed the same thing as in You Are Not Alone The number of pages used to describe her clothes and accessories is totally excessive. Every morning, we witness her repetitive and uninteresting reflection to choose what she is going to wear. She has two options, so we quickly get the hang of it: either she dresses professionally, or she puts on some kind of pajamas. We even know how she makes up, that is to say very normally, and which is the brand of her bags (Chanel and Louis Vuitton). She buys an ivory bun pin at a ridiculous price at the beginning of the book, and we know every time she decides to wear it. It's deadly boring. Please, authors, stop this.

I didn't hate my reading, it was okay. But I warn you: you can find better.