Ian Hamilton’s feisty heroine Ava Lee tracks down white collar fraud and retrieves ill gotten gains with an ancient and deadly form of martial arts. Think Jackie Chan meets Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. And if the going gets a little rough sometimes, well Ava and her mentor Uncle like to think of themselves as the guardian angels of investors, restoring lives.

Six things you'll learn from this Joys of Binge Reading episode:

How the prospect of dying got Ian writing

Why the process of writing is 'magical' for him

Ava Lee as guardian angel

The one thing that's most contributed to Ian's success

The crime writer at the top of his binge read list

And how Ava's mentor -'Triad Uncle" - got his own series

Where to find Ian Hamilton:

Ian can be found at his website: http://ianhamiltonbooks.com/

On Facebook  https://www.facebook.com/avaleenovels/

And on Twitter: https://twitter.com/avaleebooks

For more details, a full transcript follows:  Note - this is a "close as" rendering of our full conversation with links to key points. (Not word for word)

Jenny: Hello there, I'm your host Jenny Wheeler and today Ian is going to tell us how he made a Chinese Canadian forensic accountant so sexy  - yup -  so sexy - that all eleven books in the Ave Lee series have been optioned for TV or movies.

Hello there Ian and welcome to the show. It’s great to have you with us.

Ian: Thank you Jenny I am very pleased to be with you.

Jenny:  Ian you’ve said you’ve had “40 years between books.” You wrote a very successful history book in the late 60's  that became a Book of the Month selection it was popular - and then business and government jobs intervened for forty years 2011 when you got the idea for Ava Lee and wrote four books in eight months. Have I got that right?

Ian: That's true!

'Story teller' Ian Hamilton

Jenny: So what was the "Once Upon a Time” moment that got you started on Ava’s story?

Ian:  The "Once upon a time moment" was the prospect of death. I actually thought of Ava Lee in summer of 2009 and I was still running a business. It was very stressful at the time, there was a lot of money involved, and I was probably drinking too much.  My wife sent me off to the doctor.  She said 'Your liver has got to be shot." And my liver was perfect, but they found I had an aneurism. I ended up in one of the big old hospitals in Toronto for eight hours of surgery.

As I was being rolled back to the ward after surgery the orderly said to me "You room is  in an old wing of the hospital. If you see any nuns, don't talk to them."  And I said "Why wouldn't I talk to a nun?" and he said "Because they are dead, and they only come to talk to you if they think you are going to die."

So here I was, its the middle of the night heavily medicated I drugged up to the eyeballs, hearing noises, seeing shadows, and I was actually really terrified. And I lay there thinking I am going to die, and I'm going to die having not done a lot of the things I want to have done - and one of those was writing a book - or trying to write a book I should say.

So on my second day out I sold the shares in my business, and on the third day out I started writing a book.

Jenny: Wow.  When you say write a book you obviously had already written a very successful non fiction book, so you're talking here about fiction?

Ian: Fiction right, and I loved the crime mystery thriller genre but I had no clue what I was doing. No clue. When I started writing I had the name Ava Lee, which came to me from nowhere, and one sentence. No plot, I didn't do an outline.

Ava Lee - Ian Hamilton series

Jenny:  Amazing.  Just back tracking for a moment . .