The Fish Kisser: Another Inspector Bliss Mystery

Michael Payne is head of the Research and Publications Program at the
Historic Sites and Archives Service, Alberta Community Development, and
the co-author of A Narrative History of Fort Dunvegan.

This is James Hawkins’s second mystery thriller featuring Detective
Inspector David Bliss, a British cop with some familiar
issues—advancing age, declining prospects, and incompetent colleagues.
Bliss, however, soldiers on and finds himself in some rather startling
circumstances, including a doomed affair with a Dutch policewoman, a car
chase across the Middle East, and a plot to infect the computer systems
of the Western World with a deadly virus.

The book starts from an interesting premise. What happens if the victim
of a crime is also the perpetrator of another quite separate, and
completely unsuspected, crime? Roger LeClarc is a nerdy, repressed, but
brilliant computer programmer. The Iraqis want to kidnap him to work
with other kidnapped computer experts on their super virus, but LeClarc
is a kidnapper in his own right. He has imprisoned a girl he met through
the Internet, but no one suspects this crime. When he goes overboard
from a cross-channel ferry, the two plots start running in parallel.
Before long there are multiple races against time: will LeClarc be found
on his life raft, and who will find him—the authorities or the people
trying to snatch him for the Iraqis? Will his victim survive, and will
Bliss stop the kidnapped computer programmer plot?

It all adds up to a very complicated, perhaps overly complicated, plot.
With so many interconnected stories at work, it is tough to sustain the
narrative tension. In the end, the escape from the Iraqi computer prison
camp seems a trifle anticlimactic after all the buildup. Still, the book
ends on a nice ironic note as the spooks and senior government officials
move in to bury the story. Bliss is not rewarded for his efforts, and
millions of computer users remain oblivious to the terrorist potential
of computer viruses.