The Last Dance by Mark Billingham (Sphere, £22)
Set in Blackpool, Mark Billingham’s new series starts with the killing of two men – one the heir to a crime empire, the other an IT consultant – in adjacent hotel bedrooms, and proceeds at a smart clip, expertly bedding in characters along the way. The protagonist, widowed DS Declan Miller, provides a novel spin on the emotionally-unfit-copper-returning-to-work-too-soon trope. His hobbies are ballroom dancing, pet rats and mentally discussing the case with his late wife, Alex, a police officer killed in the line of duty. A gobby maverick, Miller treats everything with a mixture of sarcasm and dad humour – which might be hard to take, were he not perfectly balanced by his new work partner, Yamaha-riding thrash metal devotee DS Sara Xiu, who never, ever, gets the jokes. There’s a memorable supporting cast, and the overarching mystery of his wife’s death provides a hook for titles to come. Billingham’s Tom Thorne series set the bar very high indeed, but The Last Dance is well up to standard – funny, moving and expertly plotted.
