Two to tango: Mark Billingham mystery explores partnership

Dropping us into a rainy town, the novel “The Last Dance” gives readers a gripping protagonist, deadpan humor, and thoughtful attention to love and loss.

Welcome to Blackpool, England. Home to faded casinos, blazing neon, and the ebb and flow of holiday makers. 

In “The Last Dance,” international bestselling author Mark Billingham plunks readers into this drizzly seaside town. One part has-been, one part up-and-comer, the Lancashire resort is an effective choice for his appealing new crime thriller about the bewilderment of grief and the plusses of partnership. 

Billingham boasts loads of novels, including 18 in the popular Detective Inspector Tom Thorne series. He’s won, twice, the Theakston Old Peculier Crime Novel of the Year Award. 

In this series launch, Billingham unveils a brash — and battered — smart aleck protagonist. Detective Sergeant Declan Miller chafes under authority, suffers zero fools, lobs jokes, proffers puns, and gleefully vaults personal boundaries. Deep down, he also cares immensely about the hard-working, good-hearted souls in his orbit, whether they’re colleagues, witnesses, criminals, … or tuxedoed competitors. Miller, it turns out, isn’t just a detective; he’s an amateur ballroom dancer.

A gumshoe who can quickstep. A sergeant who sambas.

Miller’s dancing days have stalled, however, since the murder of his partner in life and tango, Alexandra (call her Alex), the night of the North-West Lancashire Over Forties competition. On leave from work and mired in grief, Miller hides at home caring for pet rats, Fred and Ginger, and talking with Alex’s ghost, until the silence starts to suffocate. He returns to the office where he faces stunned colleagues; a new partner, Sara Xiu; and the bitter news that he’s forbidden from touching Alex’s case.

“I need to work,” Miller insists to his boss. “I need to do something.”

Fortunately, there’s much to do. Ordered to investigate a suspicious death at the local Sands Hotel, Miller and Xiu discover not one, but two bodies on the tacky carpeting: the ne’er-do-well son of a local crime lord dead by gunshot in one room and a vanilla-dull IT professional equally inert across the hall. Are the murders connected? The search for answers thrusts the duo into the posh living rooms, smoky pubs, and trendy offices of multiple suspects. 

With snappy dialogue and deadpan humor, the propulsive story takes hold, unfolding with a thriller’s familiar beats — reluctant witnesses, risky alliances, cat-and-mouse chases — while fleshing out indelible, and often delightful, characters. Razor-sharp Alex, introduced through flashbacks and visits to Miller’s consciousness, was clearly a perfectly matched partner: as dedicated to work as her husband, but also light and open. Unruffled Xiu carries secrets and surprises; she’s a terrific foil to Miller’s unfiltered id, and one hopes  she will reveal more tics and traits as the series continues. Also entertaining are Miller’s ballroom dance chums whose gentle patience and good-natured ribbing get him box-stepping again.

With two weeks to go before Richard Osman’s next Thursday Murder Club installment, Billingham’s Detective Miller novel deftly fills the arch-British-crime-thriller gap. “The Last Dance” is spikier — irreverent asides abound — and more graphic in spots. It’s also thoughtful, wise to the whiplashes of grief, and attentive to the myriad relationships that can thread through, and lift, a life.