Lovelace and Button (International Investigators) Inc.: An Inspector Bliss Mystery

David Bliss #6

by James Hawkins

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.

330 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2004

About the author

Librarian Note:
There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

James Hawkins was a police commander in the U.K. for twenty years and a Canadian private investigator for a further eight years. From 1992 to 1997, he was director of education at the Canadian Institute for Environmental Investigations. His debut mystery novel, Missing: Presumed Dead (2001), introduced his popular detective, David Bliss.

Reviews

[Barbara · Rating 2 out of 5]

Just dumb! I liked the characters, at least the good guys. The bad guys were basically cartoons. It started our promising enough, in England, but then everybody flew to Canada. By coincidence, David is scheduled to attend a conference in Seattle that starts just after it comes to light that something mysterious in Canada is causing suicides in England. And by coincidence, his companions Daphne and Trina, with all of North America spread around them, stumble upon the bad guys their first day out--and they're not even looking for them! The rest of the plot just falls apart, and seems to have been constructed just as a means of presenting the U.S. government as totalitarian thugs. It was just presented in too clumsy and heavy-handed a way to be entertaining.And he used too many adverbs.