The Last Dance: A Detective Miller case - the first new Billingham series in 20 years

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Her murder remains unsolved and this sits very badly with Miller - and he lets the team working the case know of his displeasure…with predictable results.

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. I liked the dynamic between the two characters, their differences and similarities ensure there’s always something interesting happening. Declan gathers information from some unexpected sources like Finn, a homeless addict; and Chesshead, a criminal with a passion for the game. DISCLOSURE: Thank you to Grove Atlantic via NetGalley for providing a digital ARC of The Last Dance by Mark Billingham for review. Yet they make a brilliant partnership and I look forward to seeing this develop further over the course of the series.

Miller is morbid, funny, buffoon-ish, but also epitomizes dogged, persistent, plugging-away-at-it police work. 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.

His relationship with her is more awkward than expected because she doesn’t get his humour or his jokes.

The fifth novel in Tim Sullivan’s series featuring neurodiverse detective George Cross of the Avon and Somerset Police is an investigation into the death of Benedictine monk Brother Dominic, whose badly beaten body, tied to a chair, has been found in a ditch at a West Country beauty spot. It is surmised the intended target was Adrian Cutler, part of the local crime family, and the man next door, IT consultant Barry Shepherd was perhaps a case of mistaken identity. Humor is essential in thrillers and crime books but face it this was no thriller or crime fiction, at best it was a cozy mystery.