GEOFFREY WANSELL
THE LAST DANCE by Mark Billingham (Sphere £22, 400pp)
AfTer more than two decades, the immensely talented Billingham has come up with a new detective hero to sit alongside dI Tom Thorne, the star of his 18 bestsellers that began in 2001.
dI declan Miller is eccentric, to say the least, a man who loves ballroom dancing and keeps two pet rats named fred and Ginger at his Blackpool home.
But Miller is also coping with intense grief, as his detective wife has been murdered recently. so he returns to work to ease the pain and finds himself investigating the case of two men, apparently unconnected, killed in adjoining hotel rooms in a local seaside hotel. Who could have done it and why?
Teamed up with new arrival ds sara Xiu, Miller discovers that one is the infamous son of a local gangster. Could his death be part of a gang feud? And so begins a superb story packed with Miller’s iconoclastic wit and disrespect for authority.
It is an unmitigated joy from the very first page to last — and reminds the world just why Billingham is one of Britain’s greatest crime writers.
PRAYING MANTIS by R. V. Raman (Pushkin Vertigo £9.99, 304pp)
ThIs is the third outing for raman’s cerebral retired Indian detective harith Athreya, and it proves just what a fascinating character he has become. Languid, intuitive and never aggressive, Athreya is born of the golden age of crime fiction, all charm and good temper, though working in modern day India.
here he is invited to a boutique hotel founded in a castle in the foothills of the himalayas and owned by an old police colleague, who fears there is a conspiracy afoot among the guests.
Then bloody handprints start to appear on the hotel walls, shortly before a young guest falls to her death from the ramparts. on the surface it is a classic locked-room mystery, but one executed with such grace and style
that it never seems old-fashioned or forced. Athreya is a detective to cherish.
THE TWENTY by Sam Holland (HarperCollins £16.99, 464pp)
IN The wake of her grisly but compelling debut, The echo Man, last year, holland returns with another serial killer thriller that makes the blood run cold. Not for the fainthearted, it is nevertheless riveting reading with an overlap to the author’s debut, in that the detectives involved know each other, and know the toll this kind of gruesome case can take.
It opens with the discovery of five murder victims on a construction site near the river, each given a number in roman numerals, which slowly reveals the killer is counting down his murder victims — intent on reaching a total of 20 in all.
dCI Adam Bishop has never seen anything like it. But then his ex-wife, dr romilly Cole, turns up to remind of him of a case that had a traumatic effect on her in the past which involved her serial killer father. Could they be connected, and if so, how?
Packed with suspense, it is a story that horrifies and hypnotises at the same time.