Tuesday Jocks and Other Stories by Fin J Ross

Title: Tuesday Jocks and Other Stories

Author: Fin J Ross

Genre: Crime

Publisher: Clan Destine Press

Published: 1^st November 2024

Format: Paperback

Pages: 213

Price: $32.99

Synopsis: A linguistics expert solves the murder of her mentor.

Mrs Hudson foils a plot to assassinate Queen Victoria.

Men keep dying from their own sheer stupidity.

A frozen man is discovered in post-apocalyptic Antarctica.

A policewoman is baffled by a man’s missing underwear.

Murder, treachery and treason are afoot on a distant planet.

A teenager becomes a bushranger in pursuit of retribution.

Award-winning short story writer Fin J. Ross presents her first collection of mystery stories.

These 15 deadly tales – eight of which won category prizes in the annual Scarlet Stiletto Awards run by Sisters in Crime Australia – will transport you from the Victorian goldfields to Victorian England; from the freezing climes of Antarctica to the Faroe Islands; from outback Queensland to the planet Kyrnos; and so many places in between.

Get set for a whirlwind mystery tour, expect the unexpected, and choose your companions wisely in award-winner Fin J. Ross‘ Tuesday Jocks.

~*~

Clan Destine Press’s fabulous Crime Waves series continues with a murder and mayhem filled collection of fifteen stories from Fin J Ross that traverse a titillating array of themes and stories. Whether it is linguistics as clues, crimes of the future, Antarctic communities of women separate from men, missing underwear and bushrangers, as well as a fantastic Sherlock Holmes retelling that centres Mrs Hudson, each one has humour, crime, murder and lots of different perspectives for readers to explore.

The stories are dark and light, and everything in between, whether on earth, in history or on a different place entirely. Each story is a different examination of crime, its investigators, its perpetrators, and its victims, or the almost victims in some cases, showing that the crime and mystery genre has great depths that Finn J Ross has dug into to tell her stories, some of which have satisfying endings, and others may not be resolved, and others have a few surprises in store – surprises that change the trajectory and purpose of the story. I liked these ones, because we got something that we least expected, something that readers may not think will happen in crime. As I was reading these stories, I found that Finn was able to seamlessly write in a range of different voices and perspectives, and used research effectively to explore future worlds or the past, and how current events might impact the future and the implications this might have for crime.

The ones that won awards in the Scarlett Stiletto awards over the years – listed at the back – were ones that earned their award. I could see why, because they all had that special something that makes a story stand out and work effectively, that sings and dances off the page and makes the reader think, or at the very least, entertains them. Or both – the best ones did both, and encouraged readers to examine what the world could become given the way things have been going and what might happen – even though it is fiction. It’s quite eerie when fiction starts to hint at what might really happen in the world. It reminds us that we’re not that far away from a disaster that could see some of these stories become a reality.

It’s the unsettling stories like these that make crime work, that ensure readers sit up and pay attention, because they get into the grittiness of crime, and the extremes of crime. It’s a world that really does have shades of grey, where a motive may or may not make sense, where justice may or may not be served, but where we read to see villains get some kind of comeuppance. I think readers will love these stories, relishing in the array of femininity explored throughout as women are given a voice within the crime genre that has often been lacking at times, and is starting to grow – and every story, whether it is a short story, a novel, an anthology or true crime, adds to this. And Finn J Ross’s new anthology is no exception.