The Shadow Step

The new Detective Miller thriller from bestselling author Mark Billingham, full of tension, wit and incredible twists.

'I'm excited to have found a new favourite detective' CLAIRE DOUGLAS

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

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

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.

Mark Billingham has twice won the Theakston Old Peculier Award for Crime Novel of the Year, the Sherlock Award for the best detective created by a British writer and in 2026 he was awarded the Crime Writers' Association Diamond Dagger for an outstanding lifetime contribution to the genre. Sleepyhead and Scaredy Cat were made into a hit TV series on Sky 1 starring David Morrissey as Tom Thorne, and a series based on the novels In the Dark and Time of Death was broadcast on BBC1. Mark lives in north London with his wife and two children.