The Pie & Mash Detective Agency by J D Brinkworth

About the book: Who is Nellie Thorne and why does she keep disappearing? Jane Pye and Simon Mash are on the case in this cosy crime mystery novel.

Local schoolteacher Dev Hooper arrives home from work to find his girlfriend, Nellie Thorne, has vanished.

But she is not the first Nellie Thorne to disappear. In fact, she is the fifth in fifty years.

Enter Jane Pye and Simon Mash: a millennial couple who signed up for a private detective night class on a whim. When they are assigned Dev's case for their coursework, they quickly realise they have bitten off more than they can chew.

Armed with just six weeks of notes, matching trench coats, and questionable detective skills, they set out to solve a case that has baffled Kent's police for decades.

What links the missing Nellies? And why does everyone keep talking about ghosts!?

Is it an open and shut case? Not on your Nellie…

The Pie & Mash Detective Agency (2026) is J D Brinkworth's first novel. 

About the authors: J D Brinkworth is the pseudonym of London-based writing duo Jo Dinkin and Catherine Brinkworth. Catherine is a comedy writer and winner of the BBC Comedy Writing Bursary. She has written on flagship BBC shows like the News Quiz and Have I Got News For You. Jo won the 2020 Green Stories writing prize and was nominated for Best Screenplay at the British Horror Film Festival. They both recently graduated as private detectives from a suspiciously cheap online detecting course.

Rating: 5/5

Communion: Finding My Way Back To Faith by J D Vance

About the book: "The story of how I regained my faith, of course, only happened because I had lost it to begin with. The interesting question that hangs over this book, and over my mind, is why I ever strayed from the path. Why the Christian faith of my youth failed to properly take root. I'm glad I found my way back to the Church. I learned much along the way. But if you believe as I do, you know I've been fortunate and touched by God's grace. To summarize this book: I'm a Christian, and I became a Christian because I believe that Jesus Christ's teachings are true. But I didn't always think that, and by sharing my journey I might be helpful to others - Catholic, Protestant, or otherwise - who are seeking reconciliation with God." - J D Vance

From the bestselling author of Hillbilly Elegy, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith is an intimate account of why Vice President JD Vance strayed from the Christianity of his youth and what led him back to faith.

Communion is a spiritual exploration of what it means to be a Christian in all the seasons of life JD Vance has experienced - as a child, a young man, a husband, a father, and a leader.

Picking up in some ways where Hillbilly Elegy left off, Communion recounts how Vance's pursuit of material privileges ultimately led him into a secular wilderness.

Communion reveals how Vance regained his faith and discusses his conversion to Catholicism, how his faith guides his work in public life, and how it shapes his thoughts about the future.

Communion will be on sale in eBook, audiobook and hardback on 16 June 2026 in the US and 9 July 2026 in the UK.

About the author: J D Vance grew up in the Rust Belt city of Middletown, Ohio, and the Appalachian town of Jackson, Kentucky. He enlisted in the Marine Corps after high school and served in Iraq. A graduate of Ohio State University and Yale Law School, he was elected to the United States Senate representing Ohio in 2022. In 2024, he became the Republican nominee for Vice President and since 2025, serves as the 50th Vice President of the United States. Vance lives in Washington, DC with his family.

The Donkey and the Palm (Matthew 21:1-9)

Poor Writers, Poor Thinkers

My Grandfather, The Master Detective by Masateru Konishi

About the book: There used to be a cafe called Mon Cheri at Nishi Waseda where members of the Waseda Mystery Club spent day after day frothing in excitement over the latest mystery novels.

As a lover of classic crime stories, it is perhaps no surprise that twenty-seven-year-old schoolteacher Kaede encounters everyday mysteries more often than your average person. Solving them is another matter, though, and the person she always heads to for guidance is her beloved grandfather – who, despite having dementia, retains a keen sharpness of mind.

From impossible locked-room murders to confounding missing person cases, the granddaughter and grandfather team ‘weave stories’ in master-and-apprentice fashion. Together, they get to the bottom of case after case. 

But, all the while, a shadow slowly closes in on Kaede, posing a more insidious threat.

Filled with charming characters and steeped in references to classic crime – from Christie to Chesterton to Poe – My Grandfather, the Master Detective is a touching, charming mystery by Masateru Konishi. 

My Grandfather, The Master Detective is translated from the Japanese by Louise Heal Kawai, winner of the Lindsley and Masao Miyoshi Traslation Prize 2025.

About the author: Masateru Konishi graduated from the Department of English and American Literature at Meiji University, and now works as a writer for TV and radio. He has previously written for the stage as well as a manga story, but My Grandfather, the Master Detective is his debut novel. Partly based on his own experience of caring for his father with dementia, the book won the 21st edition of the prestigious ‘This Mystery is Amazing!’ Grand Prize.

About the translator: Louise Heal Kawai has been a Japanese-English literary translator since 2006. Her translations include a variety of mystery and literary fiction. In 2025, she was awarded the Lindsley and Masao Miyoshi Translation Prize by the Donald Keene Center of Japanese Culture for her translation of The North Light by Hideo Yokoyama. She is also the translator of Sosuke Natsukawa’s The Cat Who Saved Books. Louise comes from Manchester in the UK and currently resides in Yokohama.

Rating: 5/5

The Angelus

In 1857, Jean-François Millet painted two peasants in a field, heads bowed, tools at their feet.

It became one of the most reproduced paintings in history.

What most people do not know is that the two peasants are praying the Angelus.

For 700 years, Europeans stopped everything three times a day: fields, markets, workshops and home.

They pray the same prayer at 6am, Noon and 6pm everyday.

The Church bells continue to ring at 6am, Noon and 6pm today.

But most do not hear it or do not know why anymore.

(Credit: Robbert Leusink)

Betrayal by Tom Bower

About the book: The British Crown is in crisis, with constitutional threats at home and abroad.

At a landmark moment in royal history, can King Charles overcome the scandals that blight the Royal family?

Can the broken bonds between the Houses of Sussex and Windsor ever be repaired?

With inimitable research and exclusive interviews from insiders, Britain's leading investigative biographer Tom Bower exposes the latest contortions in the explosive Royal saga of power and betrayal.

Betrayal: Power, Deceit and the Fight for the Future of the Royal Family will be released on 26 March 2026. It is available to pre-order now.

About the author: Tom Bower is an investigative historian, broadcaster and journalist, and author of 27 bestselling books encompassing a remarkably wide range of subjects. His most recent books include the No 1 bestselling Revenge, the explosive bestseller, The House of Beckham, the most authoritative and bestselling account of Tony Blair's decade as prime minister and the definitive biographies of Boris Johnson, Jeremy Corbyn and Gordon Brown.

Bower is probably best known for his unvarnished and unauthorised biographies of Britain's most controversial tycoons including Robert Maxwell, Richard Branson, Mohamed al-Fayed, Tiny Rowland, Bernie Ecclestone and Simon Cowell. He lives in London with his wife.

Meditations On The Way Of The Cross Of Albert Servaes by Titus Brandsma OCarm

About the booklet: This is the first station of the Way of the Cross by the Flemish expressionist painter Albert Servaes (1883-1966). He created it in 1919 for a church in the small village of Luithagen, Belgium, where it has continually received a great amount of attention. It is considered the pinnacle of Servaes’ work. One of the favoured themes of this deeply religious artist was the suffering of Christ, inspired by the gruesome events of World War I.

Servaes’ fourteen stations show the passion of Christ in all its rawness and inhumanity. The dark charcoal drawings and the thick lines present Christ’s agony in a direct and unadorned manner. The realistic character of these stations contrasted sharply with the usual manner of rendition. 

Hence, soon after its placement, the work was condemned and by order of the Vatican removed from the church of Luithagen. It went from place to place and finally ended up in the Abbey of Koningshoeven near Tilburg in the south of the Netherlands in 1952.

This booklet (2004) has been published so as to allow readers to share in Brandsma's meditations as an entry into their own reflections on the passion and death of Jesus. The gruesome detail with which Titus at times imagines the passion of Christ may not suit every taste; but, one must remember, crucifixion was a rather nasty business. These meditations are not mere pious platitudes. Brandsma's sincere sorrow and love shine through them, the portent of his own Christ-like passion and death. May they be an inspiration of your own authentic prayer and meditation on this great gift of salvation: the suffering, death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

About the author: Titus Brandsma OCarm was declared Blessed by Pope John Paul II on November 1985 and canonized on 15 May 2022 by Pope Francis.

The life of Titus Brandsma began in the quiet countryside of Friesland, Holland, where he was born on 23 February 1881, and ended some sixty years later on 26 July 1942, in the notorious hospital of the Dachau concentration camp.

Titus Brandsma, Dutch priest, educator, journalist and modern mystic, has much to say to Twenty-first Century Christians. His joyful countenance in the face of chronic illness and finally, at the torturous hands of the Nazi’s, is a study in humankind’s sharing of its portion of the Cross of Christ. The frail, bookish-looking clergyman with the big cigar, labeled “That dangerous little friar” by his enemies, was able to perform heroic acts of suffering, followed by forgiveness, because his faith and trust in God was so firmly rooted in prayer. Unlike Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross, who made a deliberate commitment of her life as an atonement for sin, Father Brandsma did not seek martyrdom, yet when he was thoroughly convinced it was God’s Will, he was able to accept humiliation and even death.

About Albert Servaes: Albert Servaes (1883-1966) was a Belgian expressionist painter. He was part of the first Latem school of painting which focused on mystical realism and became a founder of Belgian expressionism later in life. As a committed Catholic, he was ranked as a religious artist, typically showing the suffering of Christ, which stirred controversy in the Catholic Church. He also gained fame for his Belgian rural scene. 

Albert Servaes was born in the city of Ghent, in the Flanders region of Belgium. At the age of 23, Servaes joined a community of artists in Latem, just outside of Ghent. He developed an interest in religious works and mysticism, which would play a major part in the first LatemSchool. Other members of the school included George Minne, Gustave van de Woestijne, Valerius De Sardeleer and Albijn Van den Abeele. The school’s mystical realism orientation was a reaction to the Paris-based impressionist art that had dominated the painting world for the previous half-century. 

Servaes later experimented with painting techniques that founded Flemish expressionism. Because of his sympathies for Nazi cultural policy during the occupation of Belgium in World War II, Servaes fled to Switzerland in 1944 where he would remain until his death in 1966.

Formed Within A Christian Society

Doing Sensible and Human Things

Definition: Forgive And Forget

Read Entire Books

Saint Barnabas The Apostle

London Falling by Patrick Radden Keefe

About the book: From the Baillie Gifford Prize-winning and Sunday Times bestselling author of Empire of Pain and Say Nothing comes a riveting story of wealth, violence and deceit at the heart of a glittering city.

In 2019, a London teenager, Zac Brettler, fell to his death from a luxury apartment building on the banks of the Thames. On a desperate quest to understand how their son had died, his grieving parents made a terrible discovery: Zac had been leading a fantasy life, posing as the son of a wealthy Russian oligarch.

In his inimitably gripping and forensic prose, Patrick Radden Keefe follows Zac’s parents on a dark journey to find out what brought Zac to the balcony that night – and how a teenager’s world of make-believe drew him into the city’s terrifying underworld. 

London Falling is at once a devastating family tragedy, a riveting story of greed, power and deception, and an indictment of the culture that has transformed London into a haven for the malignant forces that have come to influence us all.

London Falling : A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City, and a Family’s Search for Truth will be released on 7 April 2026. It is available to pre-order now.

About the author: Patrick Radden Keefe is a staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of London Falling: A Mysterious Death in a Gilded City and a Family's Search For Truth, the bestsellers Empire of Pain: The Secret History of the Sackler Dynasty (winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction), Rogues: True Stories of Grifters, Killers, Rebels and Crooks (a collection of his New Yorker stories), and Say Nothing: A True Story of Murder and Memory in Northern Ireland (named one of the 20 Best Books of the 21st Century by the New York Times and now streaming as a limited series on Disney+), as well as two critically acclaimed books, The Snakehead and Chatter. He is the writer and host of the eight-part podcast Wind of Change, which The Guardian named the #1 podcast of 2020, and the recipient of the National Magazine Award for Feature Writing, the Orwell Prize for Political Writing, and the National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. He lives in New York.

My Conversations With Poor Souls by Eugenie von der Leyen

About the book: In addition to the Church Militant on earth and the Church Triumphant in heaven, there is, according to Catholic teaching, the Suffering Church in Purgatory, which, according to God's plan of salvation, needs our help so much. 

It is this world of the Suffering Church that confronts us in this, the diary of Princess Eugenie von der Leyen. She had a special kind of charisma, a permission from God that allowed suffering souls to contact her. 

Eugenie's diary from 1921-1929 is considered by experts to be the best in its field. This diary has a providential task: With the power of genuine charisma, it can sensitize us again to the world beyond, it can open our eyes to the "ultimate things" that are so much repressed today. How poor we are without the awareness of the blissful communion with out mighty friends in heaven and with our fellow sufferers in purgatory who are so in need of our help.

Through unforgettable figures, words of supplication, and heart-rending gestures, My Conversations with Poor Souls (2022) sensitizes us and opens our eyes to the unspeakable plight of the poor souls undergoing purification from their earthly sins.

My Conversations with Poor Souls is translated from the German by Jason Chapman.

About the author: Raised in an aristocratic cradle, a girl named Eugenie was born on 15 May 1867 in Munich, inheriting all the honours of the Germanic dynasty of Von der Leyen und zu Hohengeroldseck, and of the Thurn und Taxis lineage. Nobody, however, could have suspected that, allied to her high birth, remarkable gifts and charisms granted by the special disposition of Divine Providence would adorn her noble soul. 

Eugenie left us a diary, thanks to the happy recommendation of her spiritual director. These are pages that let us feel the love and mercy of the good God, as well as the great justice manifested in His sentences. Each of the annotations reveals interior dramas; not, however, of living people, but of souls in the afterlife, suffering the pains due to their sins.

Indeed, from the middle of 1921 until her last days, the princess received continuous visits from souls in Purgatory, who came to meet her in the most varied ways, begging for suffrage in the midst of so much pain. Screams, slamming doors, footsteps in the corridor, shadows and frights, sudden windstorms, weeping and moaning, in short, everything that for us would constitute a true horror story became part of Eugenie’s routine. She died on 9 January 1929 at the age of 62. 

Definition: Dandelion

Genuine Human Connection Replaced

Stillness In Those Pauses

Charles Dickens (1812-1870)

Men Have Forgotten God: That's Why All This Has Happened

Humour And Wit From 200 Years Ago

St David of Wales' Day