The Shadow Step

'Edge-of-your-seat tension, wit and heart - fantastic!' LISA JEWELL

'Funny, moving, and full of surprises. An absolute treat' MICK HERRON

'Billingham at his best' The Times

★ 'Combining humor, pathos, and genuine surprise, it's another home run from Billingham.' PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, STARRED REVIEW

'The Shadow Step is another Billingham corker' Express

The Shadow Step: One taken simultaneously by a pair of dancers facing the same direction, one of them behind and slightly shifted leftwards ('in the shadow')

Typically, such a step perfectly demonstrates synchronized elegance. It showcases a couple in near telepathic harmony with one another. It does not normally end with someone stone-dead in a lake.

DS Declan Miller is a magnet for strange cases, but how can he catch a killer when the man confessing to the crime is clearly innocent? Things rapidly escalate when the murder that isn't really a murder at all attracts the unwanted attention of a drugs Queenpin, a deranged ex-squaddie and a lovesick gangland enforcer. Then a student is kidnapped...

Throw in a wobbly dog, a pair of ceramic leopards and the distracting smell from a local biscuit factory, and - if he wants to save a young man's life - Miller has little choice but to waltz all the way into the shadows.