THE SHADOW STEP

Readers shocked by the downbeat ending of What the Night Brings (2025) will be happy to know things are brighter in DS Declan Miller’s Blackpool than in DI Tom Thorne’s London.

Brighter, of course, is a relative term. Shortly after Barry Cheshire’s dachshund, Ruby, is threatened by a stranger’s bulldog in Claremont Park, the stranger is fished out of the park’s pond and identified as Ezra Simmons. Everyone assumes the drowning was accidental except for Miller, who’s intrigued by a gaping wound to the man’s head. While everyone argues about whether Simmons, a drug dealer seriously in debt to another dealer, was murdered, someone knocks on Barry Cheshire’s door and fatally stabs Darren Grant, the lover who’d moved in with Stacey Cheshire, while her estranged husband sleeps through it all in the basement. Now that he has at least one incontestable homicide to deal with, Miller finds time in between his relentlessly snarky comments to his partner, DS Sara Xiu; their boss, DI Tim Sullivan; and every potential witness to focus on the crime family run by Jacqui Cutler while her husband, Wayne, languishes in prison, sent there largely by his wife’s testimony. Jacqui is so brutal at running JMC Ltd. and its affiliated tentacles that readers might be tempted to cheer when her son, Justin, is kidnapped—if Justin hadn’t been so consistently critical of the family business. The quest to recover Justin Cutler in return for an unexpected ransom draws all the major players into high-stakes, multilayered conflicts before an epilogue shines the spotlight on Finn, the hero’s seriously addicted stepdaughter.

Not as powerful as Tom Thorne’s caseload, but it goes down a lot easier.