Kirjahaku

Detective Inspector David Bliss has been transferred from London, England, to Hampshire in what appears to his new subordinates and superiors as a move down the career ladder. His first day on the job begins with a murder: Jonathan Dauntsey, son of the Major, willingly confesses to murdering his father. It's an open-and-shut case, until the investigation stalls when the police can't find the body. D.I. Bliss follows a trail of clues that lead him back in time to the point where the central presumption of the case - a murdered father - comes into question. Who did Jonathan Dauntsey murder, if anyone at all? As the mystery of the murder begins to resolve itself, so does the mystery of Bliss's transfer from the big city to a small town.

In The Fish Kisser, a megalomaniac becomes determined to exact revenge on the Western world through a devious plot of global cyber-warfare. He enlists his own agents to track down and kidnap the experts and educated elite that can help him accomplish the unthinkable. With a series of staged deaths and disappearances, he sets his plan in motion. When the hired henchmen target Roger LeClarc, an English computer expert with a dark secret of his own, the hunters become the hunted. English detective David Bliss, who chased and was chased around the English countryside in Missing: Presumed Dead, teams up with Dutch detective Yolanda Pieters to solve this improbable affair. Fighting internal politics, stumbling upon government cover-ups, and even battling Saddam Hussein's Republican Guard, together they chase a trail of blood, intrigue, and romance across Europe to Iraq in a desperate search for the kidnapped specialists. Fans of the David Bliss character will not be disappointed as James Hawkins turns the action up several notches.

Melanie Gordonstone, a cherubic six-year-old, was Daddy's favourite in every way. So Margaret, her jealous 12-year-old sister, drowned her in a backyard pool. Inexperience led young Detective Bliss to attribute the girl's death to accident, but Melanie's mother drives herself mad believing her husband to be the killer. Margaret taunts her deranged mother for 10 years before putting her out of her misery, hanging her from a chandelier in a faked suicide. Now, frightened for his own safety, Margaret's father sends her to live in a remote Canadian community where he believes she can do no further damage - big mistake!

In the fourth Inspector Bliss mystery, Bliss teams up with Daphne Lovelace to trace the father of a Canadian woman whose husband is dying of cancer. While Ruth Jackson may believe that she was sired by a Beatle, Bliss and Daphne have other ideas. In Vancouver, Ruth's world falls apart when her dying husband suddenly disappears and she is arrested on suspicion of murder. His substantial life insurance policy and the blood-stained knife found in her kitchen don't help her case. Detective Sergeant Phillips of the Mounties takes up the case, and Trina Button, a zany homecare nurse, stirs up trouble for everyone in this intriguing international story.

In this, his fifth escapade, Inspector David Bliss goes undercover once again, and heads to St. Juan sur Mer on the Cotes d'Azur. His mission is so secret that even Bliss doesn't know why he is there: he only knows that he is tracking down a man the force wants in custody for an unstated reason. But the winds of the Mediterranean provide clues that take Bliss off course and lead him to unravel two of the world's best known unsolved mysteries: the identity of the Man in the Iron Mask and the location of the stolen Nazi gold.

A bizarre series of suicides by elderly women in England raises the eyebrow of newly promoted Chief Inspector David Bliss, who soon discovers that all the women had recently sent large sums of money to a Western Union account in Vancouver. As Bliss uncovers the truth behind the deaths, old friends Daphne Lovelace and Trina Button are on a road trip through North America, raising funds to help those in need of kidney transplants. But when their fabulous Kidneymobile is found unoccupied with no trace of them, a perplexed Bliss searches frantically for his friends, and the astonishing secret that links their disappearances with the suicides.

The seventh novel in the popular Inspector Bliss series is another action-packed mystery filled with nail-biting adventures involving religious sects, criminal conspiracies, and the world trade in cocoa. When an RCMP officer is murdered in Vancouver, suspicion falls upon Janet Thurgood, a woman in her sixties who appears to everyone, apart from Trina Button, to be completely mad. Trina is quick to embroil Daphne Lovelace in her efforts to discover the truth about Janet. David Bliss, meanwhile, tries to stay out of the way in the south of France, where he encounters problems of his own when, to his utter amazement, he rediscovers his one true love. Can he finally pull the trigger and make a commitment?

In its early days in Victorian England croquet was a game for the wealthy but competition from other sports - most notably tennis - the onset of two world wars, and a century of social change forced the game to adapt. Modern croquet is an intricate game of strategy, played socially within clubs and competitively at national and international level. The object of the game - to guide two balls round a circuit of loops - has changed little over the years but tactically, croquet has become much more complex, elaborate and fascinating.