Oddball couple Jane and Simon take a private detective class and must use their (admittedly limited) skills to solve a series of mysterious disappearances in this delightful debut mystery.
Intrigued? Read on to discover the synopsis and an excerpt from The Pie & Mash Detective Agency by J. D. Brinkworth, which releases on March 10th 2026.
Jane Pye and Simon Mash are a millennial couple with a little extra time on their hands. Jane was recently let go from her position as a back-end programmer, having never been quite sure what that meant. And Simon’s career as a corporate collaboration consultant seems to be less collaborating and more scrolling the internet in search of matching velour tracksuits and well-balanced charcuterie boards. When they sign up for a private detective class on a whim, they quickly realize they’ve bitten off more than they can chew.
Their instructor, having a feeling his two worst students don’t have a chance of solving anything beyond finding the classroom, assigns them the case of Nellie Thorne, a woman recently reported missing. But she’s not the first Nellie Thorne to disappear. In fact, she’s the fifth in fifty years. Jane and Simon set out to solve the case, armed with just a few days of notes, matching trench coats, and a feeling they should have enrolled in a different class. The investigation leads the newly minted Pie and Mash Detective Agency to places they never thought they’d go, including haunted woods, mysterious archives, and, most terrifyingly for Jane, Simon’s mum’s house.
As clues emerge, more questions than answers begin to pile up. What links the missing Nellies? Why do locals think she’s a ghost? Is their teacher hiding something? So what if they’re heavy on heart but light on experience. Jane and Simon are determined to uncover the truth in time to pass the class and save the day.
Alex picked up the papers and started reading. One by one, the rest of Simon and Jane’s classmates received their cases: a woman cheating on her husband with her dental hygienist, a serial cat kidnapper, and even a potential murder that the coroner had ruled an e-scooter accident.
Jane couldn’t help but notice the detective teacher’s hands were empty as he reached the desk next to theirs. He didn’t stop at the Naughty Seats but strode back to the front of the classroom.
“Right, now you’ve all got your assignments—” “Um, Gavin?” said Jane, a little too quietly.
“—in this game, it doesn’t pay to keep a client waiting. Speed is part of your reputation. You’ll present a case update next week, and the final deadline for submission is our bonus coursework presentation session on Friday of that same week. Less than two weeks away.”
“Gavin?”
Gavin heard Jane this time and rubbed his stubble as he noticed their empty, assignmentless hands.
“Oh. Right, yes, you two.” He looked in his backpack.
“Yes, bigger class number than usual this term, but I’ve actually got something, uh, very special for you . . .” As he spoke, he unloaded several things from the tattered backpack: a vape charger, a glasses cleaning kit, a handful of GPS tags, and a large ball of rubber bands.
Finally, he brought out a battered black tablet with a cracked screen. With a few dramatic swipes of his finger, he opened his emails.
“Right, yes, a very interesting one for . . . ?” “Simon and Jane.”
“Yes. Simon and Jane, your case, if you choose to accept it, is the recurring disappearance of Nellie Thorne.”
“Oooh,” said Simon. “Sounds Agatha Christie-y.” Gavin approached their desk.
“The Nellie Thorne case is a bit of an urban legend in Kent. The story goes that every decade or so, a young woman named Nellie Thorne is reported missing somewhere in the county. And it’s an odd name, isn’t it? You don’t meet many Nellies these days. But each time, the description of the woman is nearly identical. Same age, same look, same personality, decade after decade. Hasn’t been one for donkey’s years, but back in the day kids used to think she was a ghost and would wind each other up. They’d say that if you got too close to the edge of the playground, she’d snatch you up and make you disappear too.”
“Wow, the plot thickens,” said Simon, although Jane thought the plot sounded pretty thin.
“Anyway, the police have never solved it. There wasn’t any quality evidence to go on, no bodies found or any of that business. The people who reported her missing were concerned neighbors, acquaintances, and so on, nobody with useful info. The fuzz had to investigate, of course. There was a lot of pressure by the third one they looked into. But no missing persons case had ever thrown up so little evidence. It was notorious. Nowadays, most police suspect it was a hoax to waste their time, or some kind of scam.”
“Oh,” said Simon.
“Where you come in,” continued Gavin, “is that yesterday, a bloke got in touch. Says his girlfriend is Nellie Thorne and that she’s vanished. Now, you always get time wasters in the game. Part of your job as detectives will be to screen them out. Maybe this . . .” He took his reading glasses from the chain around his neck and put them on to read the tablet screen. “. . . Dev—is part of a new generation of hoaxers. Or he could be running a scam himself, or covering up a real woman’s disappearance, or anything like that. He could be a loony or an attention seeker. I want you to find out what he’s up to.”
He handed the tablet to Jane, who nudged her glasses up her nose and began speed-reading Dev’s email.
“I’ll forward that to you,” said Gavin. “You don’t mind sharing, do you? Sharing the one case, I mean.”
“Nope,” said Simon, “it sounds like the perfect case for the Pie and Mash—”
“Can we have something else, please?” interrupted Jane. “Hmm?” said Gavin.
“Well, this case is obviously a silly one. You’ve just told us he’s probably a time waster. But you gave Craniax a political assassination!” Jane pointed to the front row, where a leather-jacketed Hells Angel was scribbling a mind map in his Pukka Pad.
“Jane!” hissed Simon in the tone he used when she asked to try samples of wines at restaurants.
“I’m sorry, Gavin, and I don’t mean any offense. I think the point I’m trying to make is that—well, you might get a certain impression of us from our age and from Simon’s yellow raincoat, but we’re not just silly millennials. We can handle a real case.”
“She’s got plenty of time on her hands,” piped up a bouncer at the next table. “Probably one of those stay-at-home types who watches true-crime documentaries all day.”
“Yeah,” said his desk neighbor. “Go on, Gav—give her a proper horrible murder.”
“Excuse me!” said Jane. “I’ll have you know that I’m a back-end programmer in between positions!”
“She didn’t mean that to come out sounding like an innuendo,” Simon added helpfully.
“All right! No scuffles in class! I’ll not have a repeat of Unit Three: De-escalation Exercises,” said Gavin, for the first time projecting genuine authority.
He turned to Jane, seeming a bit taller and maybe even wider, and spoke slowly. “Janet, I understand that this case seems a bit more . . .”
“Diffuse?” offered Simon.
“. . . A bit more wackadoodle than the others. But when you’ve been a detective as long as me, you develop a radar for those cases that are ready to unravel like a jumper when you pull on the first loose thread. There’s something here. And aren’t you jumping at the chance to take the only case that’s still open?”
