The Shadow Step: The remarkable Detective Miller is back with a riveting new mystery

'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

It's Detective Miller's deadliest dance...

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.