Bonnie Jack by Ian Hamilton

Published by House of Anansi Press on June 1, 2021

Bonnie Jack is a throwback to a time when writers created credible characters in conflict and used them to tell a straightforward story. There is nothing postmodernist about Bonnie Jack. As a family drama, the story is a departure from Ian Hamilton’s crime fiction. Yet Hamilton’s Ava Lee books can be read as family dramas, albeit dramas about a crime family, an Asian version of the Sopranos. Although I wouldn’t call it a crime novel, Bonnie Jack does end with a crime, one that creates a moral dilemma for the protagonist, who must decide whether to make a personal sacrifice to help a family that, four days earlier, he didn’t know existed.

As a young man with a degree in accounting, Jack Anderson got a job with an insurance company and worked his way to the top. His competitive style — legal but cutthroat — earned him the name Bloody Jack, a nickname he detests.

With his retirement date looming, Jack is confronting a new and uncertain life. Perhaps that is what motivates him to finally confront a memory of his childhood in Scotland — the memory of his mother taking his sister to the restroom during a movie and never returning. Jack’s father didn’t want him, so Jack was taken to an orphanage. Jack was fortunate to be adopted by a loving American family, but his abandonment shaped his personality. He doesn’t trust easily. He bottles up his pain and doesn’t share it with his family. He carries a huge resentment of his mother and has never understood how she could have left him in the theater.

Jack now has a loving family of his own, but he has never told them that he was adopted. He decides the time has come to reveal his secret. More than that, he wants to travel to Scotland to ask his sister why his mother left him. After overcoming her shock, Jack’s supportive wife Anne agrees to travel to Scotland with him. During the trip, Jack not only finds his sister, but learns that he has two siblings and a niece he never knew about.

Hamilton conveys Jack’s pain without portraying him as a victim. Jack’s sister offers a sympathetic view of Jack’s mother, reminding us that we can’t understand why people behave as they do when we have not walked in their shoes. Jack is too settled into resentment to accept his sister’s perspective. Anne provides an important bridge between the two siblings, reminding them that their different views of their mother should not be the defining fact of their relationship. Anne’s humanity and the bridge she builds becomes an important factor in a critical decision that Jack must make at the novel’s end.

Jack goes through a tough week in Scotland, particularly after he learns that his father is still alive. A confrontation with his father leads to police involvement. News of the minor scandal makes its way to Jack’s board of directors, creating another stressor in his life. Jack doesn’t handle every conflict as well as he might. But then, neither did his parents. Neither do most people.

Bonnie Jack employs a simple, fast-moving plot to tell a morally complex tale. Toward the novel’s end, Jack is faced with a difficult decision that will test his character, the kind of decision that asks the reader to wonder “What would I do?” Hamilton uses Jack to remind the reader that most people are inclined toward selfishness and self-absorption, traits they need to overcome to realize their full potential as human beings. Hamilton doesn’t preach or pontificate, but in the time-honored tradition of novelists, he illustrates how hard decisions are a test of moral fiber. Readers who are looking for a throwback novel by a skilled storyteller should give Bonnie Jack a try.

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Foresight by Ian Hamilton

Published by House of Anansi Press/Spiderline on January 21, 2020 (digitial) and February 4, 2020 (paperback)

Foresight is an enjoyable addition to Ian Hamilton’s engaging look at Chinese triad villains who, villainy notwithstanding, embody traditions of loyalty and honor. Foresight is set in the early 1980s. It focuses on Chow Tung, known to all as Uncle. Fans of Hamilton’s excellent Ava Lee series will recognize Uncle as the mysterious force behind the series heroine.

While Ava Lee books are action novels, the Uncle novels (Foresight is the second, following Fate) are more in the nature of political suspense novels. The political dimensions are both internal, as Hong Kong Triad factions alternate between competing and cooperating, and external, as Uncle begins doing business in a Chinese economic zone, evoking memories of the life he fled as a much younger man. It turns out that, for Uncle, the present might be just as dangerous as the past.

Uncle grew up in Wuhan (long before COVID-19), but after a perilous swim across Shenzhen Bay, Uncle began to pay his dues as a gang member in Hong Kong. He eventually worked his way to the top of the Fanling Triad, holding the position of Mountain Master. His goal is to move the business into avenues that are honest (more or less) and sustainable, a goal that takes on some urgency when Hong Kong permits six legal off-track betting shops to complete with Uncle’s illegal shops. Even when he operates in ways that might transgress the law — other forms of gambling, massage parlors, and night markets — he has made clear to local law enforcement that he will not engage in loansharking or allow drug dealing in Fanling. The police are therefore willing to tolerate him as a semi-respectable businessman.

When China opens economic zones to encourage the production and export of goods, Uncle senses an opportunity. Not an entirely legitimate opportunity, since he’s looking at expanding the market for knockoff Lacoste clothing that the Triad sells in night markets. He invests in the Chinese company from which he buys the fake Lacostes, enlarges the line by adding other designer brands, and moves from there to designer jeans. To spread the bounty, he encourages other Hong Kong Triads to work with other economic zones to produce handbags, shoes, and other counterfeit goods. There is money to be made.

The entrepreneurial story is interesting, but the plot takes off when Uncle — who has naturally greased certain Chinese officials — finds himself used as the pawn in a political war. He is detained on a trip to China and comes to understand that if he wants to make it home to Hong Kong alive, he will need to rat out one of the government officials who has been protecting him. Will Uncle save his own skin or will he die an honorable death?

Uncle might be a criminal, but’s he’s an easy character to like. He still mourns the loss of a woman who, more than twenty years earlier, did not survive the swim to Hong Kong. He has earned the respect of his gang members by listening to them and treating them fairly. He is calm and rational, rarely losing his cool. Even the competing Mountain Masters (or at least most of them) respect his integrity, not to mention his ability to earn profits without making waves. It is hard not to root for such a decent person, unless you are in the chain of command at Lacoste.

The plot is all the more interesting because of its setting. Hamilton delves into modern Chinese political history from the Cultural Revolution to the economic reforms instituted by Deng Xiaoping. Deng even earns a cameo. While a good many crime novels that are set in America seem to be clones of each other, Hamilton gives his stories a fresh taste by steeping them in unfamiliar flavors. The novel is straightforward; Hamilton never tries to position the story as a great literary work. He instead puts likeable characters in challenging situations, introduces a credible degree of suspense, and creates an easy read that is both enlightening and entertaining.

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The Water Rat of Wanchai by Ian Hamilton

First published in Canada in 2011; published by Picador on May 6, 2014

A forensic accountant is an unlikely thriller hero, but Ava Lee is an unlikely forensic accountant. Ava is a Chinese-Canadian who is as adept with martial arts as she is with a calculator. She's more of a debt collector/skip-tracer than she is an accountant. This is, however, a big league version of debt collection.

Ava's current task is the collection of $5 million stolen from a company that financed a seafood supplier. Her travels take her to Hong Kong, Bangkok, Trinidad, Guyana, and the British Virgin Islands. None of the locales gave me the sense of seeing anything that a tourist wouldn't see, but I did get the impression that Ian Hamilton has actually been to those places. A resident's view of the countries is unnecessary as Ava has a tourist's perspective, including an obsessive concern with the amenities available at hotels, as well as their star ratings. Needless to say, Guyana disappoints her. That crime-ridden location nevertheless gives her a chance to show off her formidable fighting skills. At the same time, the story's violence is kept to a necessary minimum. This is more of a cerebral thriller than an action novel, although the action moves at a brisk pace.

Ava is my kind of thriller hero. She's intelligent, resourceful, cunning, a woman of action who thinks before she acts. She gets things done and doesn't monkey around on her way to her goal. Much the same can be said of Hamilton, who writes with certitude, reaching his goal with a minimum of fuss. This is a tightly constructed story that doesn't waste a word. That is a skill that has become increasingly rare among modern thriller writers. The story avoids overreaching and is easy to believe, another rarity in modern thrillers.

In addition to highlighting the corruption that is endemic in less developed countries, Hamilton adds color to the story with Ava's domineering mother and her inscrutable business partner, Mr. Chow. But it is Ava who makes the story work, and she makes it work well. Originally published in Canada in 2011, this is the first novel in the Ava Lee series. It has encouraged me to read the rest of them.

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