This, the second book in Mark Billingham’s new Blackpool-based crime series, continues an unbroken trend of superb story-telling, mixed with humour and characters you actually care about. DS Declan Miller sounds at first like a caricature, a grieving middle-aged policeman who wife has been murdered but who converses with her ghost, who keeps two pet rats named Fred and Ginger, rides a moped and whose hobby is ballroom dancing. In the hands of another writer, one might say that that’s a bit over the top. But not here. Miller, his dead wife Alex, her daughter Finn (who is homeless) and the others feel surprisingly real. I do still, however, long to read more about Billingham’s first detective, the north London-based DCI Tom Thorne. Maybe they could even meet and solve a crime together …