There are so many layers to 21st-century China, from its wobbly stock market to its human rights scandals to its staggering pollution, that it’s easily seen as more complex, dubious, and unique — not to mention more powerful — than most countries.

And in population size, potential wealth, and revolving political revolutions and upheavals, it can be all those things, as well as profoundly attractive to those, inside and out, looking to crack open its markets and money.

Still lingering powerfully is the mystique of Mao Tse-tung’s mid-20th-century Long March that eventually turned the country into a Communist state, albeit one by no means focused on equality of either status or suffering.

Inequality is vividly demonstrated by the raw, enduring power of the “princelings” — the offspring and further descendants of those who marched to eventual triumph alongside Mao — who have been generally impervious to their country’s roilings and rules.

Which brings us to Canadian Ian Hamilton’s ninth novel in his series starring Ava Lee, the Canadian-Chinese forensic accountant who has built a profitable but dangerous career tracking down illicitly obtained fortunes and restoring them to their more or less rightful owners.

Almost all those adventures have unfolded in Asian countries and cities, often Shanghai and Hong Kong, and under the guidance of the old man she’s called Uncle, a Chinese triad leader presumably mainly retired from gangsterism. But her mentor has died, and in his two most recent novels, Hamilton has given Ava new partners and interests.

With two women encountered in previous novels, she has formed an investment company called Three Sisters, among its first ventures the launch of a fashion line designed by a talented, if eccentric, young man.

But in The Princeling of Nanjing, she’s diverted from Three Sisters pursuits by a huge dilemma encountered by another recent ally, Xu, someone else previously mentored by Uncle and how head of a consortium of Chinese triads.

The owner of factories that produce fake consumer goods for a vast national and international market, Xu hopes to lead triad culture out of its traditional drugs, sex-trafficking and assorted other sordid criminal pursuits, into industries like his, illegal but less vile.

But now he’s afraid of being forced to set up a massive drug-manufacturing operation thanks to exortionate threats from the son of a princeling, Tsai Lian, who is the governor of China’s Jiangsu Province and also the son of a general who marched with Mao.

The entire Tsai family is embedded in a complicated set of operations involving bribes from companies that need permits from the provincial government to operate. Xu has willingly paid his portion of protection money for his own counterfeit-goods factories, but he is appalled by the idea of going into the drug-manufacturing business for the Tsais.

When he consults Ava for advice, she decides to use her well-honed investigative and forensic accountancy skills to track the Tsais’ multi-billion-dollar fortune in detail and use the information to scare the family away from further bothering Xu.

And so, for a great many of its 457 pages, the novel turns into a cascade of intricate cash flow descriptions that don’t necessarily require a forensic accounting degree to follow, but may be mainly of interest to those with such a degree.

To unearth all those eye-glazing facts, Ava recruits friends, friends of friends, bankers, spies and journalists to come up with a resolution that goes far beyond anything Xu had in mind.

More to the point, Hamilton uses his people and plot to examine Chinese class and power structures that open opportunities for massive depravities and corruptions — elements that won’t be unfamiliar to those with a cursory interest in the country.

The dialogue is often either brusque or stiff, and — an irritable quibble — the newspaper stories the novel creates don’t remotely resemble journalistic writing, but for a reasonably intense look at some of China’s more interesting and revealing innards, Hamilton has done the job.

Joan Barfoot is a novelist living in London.