The Triad Years
5 total works
In the latest installment of the Ava Lee novels, Ava must infiltrate the seedy world of the Chinese film industry to protect the woman she loves.
Ava travels to Beijing for the premiere of Mao’s Daughter, the latest film starring her secret lover, Pang Fai. After the screening, a distraught Fai tells Ava that she is being blackmailed by senior officials of the China Movie Syndicate, who seek sexual favours in return for their continued support of Fai’s career and films. When Fai resists, the threats become increasingly menacing and include the release of scandalous videos of the young Fai that could end her career entirely.
Working alongside Fai and several of her friends, Ava delves deep into the dark side of the Chinese film industry in an attempt to liberate her lover from the grasp of the Syndicate. But can Ava save Fai from her memories?
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. The women are invited to Milan to meet with Ventola and senior executives in his company. VLG offers to buy the Three Sisters’ stake in PÖ. 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 is pressured by VLG to abandon them.
Ava decides to strike back and turns to Xu for assistance, leading to a confrontation between two of the world’s biggest global crime syndicates: the Camorra and the Triad.
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 . . .
In the most explosive novel in the Ava Lee series to date, Ava partners with a CIA agent to investigate a college on a Philippine island that is suspected of training terrorists — what she discovers is brutal and shocking.
Ava has spent two nights luxuriating in a hotel in Yunnan Province with the actress Pang Fai, with whom she has begun a secret relationship. She receives an urgent phone call from Chang Wang, the right hand to the billionaire Tommy Ordonez and one of Uncle’s oldest friends.
Chang asks Ava to fly to Manila to meet with his friend, Senator Miguel Ramirez. Ramirez asks Ava to investigate a college in Tawi-Tawi, an island province in the Philippines, which he suspects is training terrorists. Ava’s investigation leads to a partnership with a CIA agent, and together they attempt to stop an international plot so horrific in size and that Ava’s judgement and morals are tested like never before.
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.