Dev Hooper, a schoolteacher, was looking for a quiet night in with his girlfriend, Nellie Thorne, but when he arrived home that night, she had vanished without trace.

What makes this stand out is that over the past fifty years, there have been four similar cases. Very similar. Right down to the name of the woman who disappeared.

The case is assigned as the final test for Jane Pye and Simon Mash, a couple who signed up for a private detective evening class as something to do. Apparently nobody has ever found a link between the four previous cases, but surely a couple with matching trenchcoats and rudimentary (at best) detective skills can achieve what Kent’s finest police officers have failed to do for decades. Can’t they?

Let’s say a little something about humour first of all. There are people who find Inside Number Nine the pinnacle of intelligent humour and wouldn’t watch Mrs Brown’s Boys if their life depended on it. There are people for whom the opposite is true. It would be very easy to say that those people are wrong – because they are, obviously – but it does show that humour is a variable concept and there is never going to be a form of comedy that everyone finds funny. Is there anything that everyone agrees on as being hilarious? Maybe Del Boy falling through the bar the first time you see it? Not sure I can think of anything else at the moment – open to suggestions.

You can probably tell where I’m coming from here because this is a comic crime novel. You probably guessed by the protagonists being called “Pye and Mash” – maybe not if you’re not from the UK – but this is clearly intended to make the reader giggle all the way to the conclusion of the interesting set-up. And as you’ll have guessed by the opening diatribe on humour, I did not find myself collapsing in spasms of laughter with this one.

I didn’t gel with the lead characters – Simon in particular came across to me as an arsehole who I would hate to be trapped in a lift with – and the plot may have an interesting hook and a decent resolution, but it takes an age to get there. It’s not a traditionally structured mystery – it’s not a whodunnit – it’s just following the leads and their teacher Gavin until they find the truth. The resolution is interesting, but it took a lot of willpower to get there.

The thing is though… if my sense of humour was in synch with the author(s), I’d have enjoyed the ride and not been bothered by the pacing of the plot.  But it wasn’t. And it makes all the difference with this subgenre. I love anything written by L C Tyler or Steve Hockensmith, for example. I like some of Simon Brett’s work (but his Blotto & Twinks books are not among them). M W Craven’s sense of humour is completely in parallel with mine.

Maybe it’s an age thing – or at least the age difference between the authors and myself. Who knows?

You know what you should do? Go to the library, or get a free sample on ebook and read the first couple of chapters. And if you like them, why not give the book a try? But if you don’t, best to do what I should have done, and find something that does tickle your funny bone instead.