By now, Mark Billingham must be
even older than me, his first novel "Sleepy Head" featuring his
seminal detective, Tom Thorne, of the London Metropolitan Police Murder Squad,
was published in 2001, 17 more followed, the last published in 2022, but he's
had the audacity to seek a fresh start, and a very fresh start it is too!
At the beginning of the novel we walk in on a middle aged guy getting ready to go to work saying goodbye to his two pet rats and climbing onto his putt-putt scooter. At the office, his colleagues are rather taken aback to see him... Welcome to the world of Declan Miller, devout ballroom dancer, inveterate joker, Detective Sergeant in the Blackpool Murder Squad, and, following the very recent murder of his wife and fellow police officer, Alex, bereft widower.
For those that do not know, Blackpool is like the Benidorm of Britain, but far seedier and with much less sun. I've never read a crime novel set there, but it is a location ripe for the genre, comparable to Brighton, the setting of Graham Greene's grim thriller, Brighton Rock.
Two men are shot one
night in contiguous rooms in an upscale hotel with the same weapon. One is the
unfaithful scion of a local criminal gang, the other an IT nerd. What, if any,
is the link between them and who wanted them dead?
DS Miller with his new sidekick
are put on the case. DS Sara Xiu, of Chinese ethnicity and in her early thirties,
is a brilliant foil for Miller, initially she comes over as cautious and
introverted, perhaps a little shy, but she soon flowers into a lightly cynical
counterbalance to her exuberant partner and we discover she has a rather racy
private life.
Borne along by Miller's
countless dad jokes which adeptly conceal a very sharp mind and a broken heart,
leavened by the setting (one of the rival gangs' godfathers is actually a drag
queen), and a think tank comprised of erstwhile coppers, now keen ballroom
dancers, this is a thoroughly entertaining read, funny without being silly,
with a solid plot and a great final hook.
This is a brilliant beginning to a new saga, I need more.
[Many thanks to NetGalley for making this ARC available to me]
