Some British crime series seem tailor-made for a classy Masterpiece Mystery treatment... and then there's Mark Billingham's Detective Miller books. The Wrong Hands, the follow-up to The Last Dance, is both a solidly crafted thriller and a bawdily funny caper full of below-the-belt humor, this time resulting from what one character dubs "Toiletgate."
The Wrong Hands begins with a Blackpool railway station sting operation gone wrong: in the men's loo, someone runs off with a briefcase that the police were expecting to be handed off to a known criminal, thereby tying him to a local murder. (The criminal's name will be familiar to readers of The Last Dance.) Among the coppers now seeking the briefcase is the capable but unfiltered Detective Sergeant Declan Miller, whose work partner has resigned herself to his penchant for "passing on information neither she nor anyone else needed to know."
The outsize talent of Billingham, who's also behind the Tom Thorne books (Bloodline; Their Little Secret), can be measured by the ease with which he balances this series' humor with its central tragedy: Miller's wife, also a detective, was recently murdered on the job; the incompetence of the team entrusted to catch her killer is a topic of Miller's periodic chin-wags with her ghost. Omniscient narration serves all the book's main players, but chapters close to Miller's perspective deliver the greatest rewards, as when he tussles with colleagues about nonsense, such as whether having hands for feet would be better than having feet for hands. --Nell Beram, author and freelance writer