New First Steps: The Last Dance by Mark Billingham

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]