Two and a half weeks ago this little cutie came to live with us as a friend for our aging Greyhound Misty. Penny is a female purebred Parson's Jack Russell 15 months old, full of cheek and mischief. She likes to sit on my knee when I'm writing or reading.
Penny
The Devil's Revenge
Final edits and read through are coming along nicely. Release date will be June 30th 2026. Watch your inbox, my Facebook page or my blog for updates.
The Devil's Revenge - Coming Soon!
Tracking Jacky
Tracking Jacky
Ever wondered about Detective Bannon’s tracking skills? This short story will help to solve the mystery.
Young Mark Bannon and his girlfriend Rita return to the homestead after a successful hunt to get a kangaroo for Rita’s pop and nan. Rita informs him she is going quondonging with her cousin Jacky and they can practice tracking. Jacky is good at hiding his tracks and has a secret hidden in his backpack he is sure will prevent Mark from finding him.
For those of you who don’t know what a quondong is, it’s an Australian native fruit tree that grows throughout the outback of South Australia. The fruit when ripe is ruby red, luscious and tart.
This would be one of the first stories I wrote many years ago now. I’m surprised it survived the many house moves on paper and eventually on floppy disk to computer to again survive crashes, until I found it again in a dusty archive on an external hard drive while sorting out some files.
Well here it is, tidied up, polished and fit for publication.
Over our lifetime we meet a lot of people, some stick to our memories others pass by without further recall. Why do we remember some and not others? Their traits, names, behaviour ... little things about them which draw us in and intrigues us.
The Australian outback was full of characters back in the 60s each with a different quirk that made them unique. Men and women from all walks of life. Australian's and some born overseas. They made their way onto the gold, opal and sapphire fields in search of their dreams. Some succeeded, most failed, but it didn't stop them from coming and giving it a go.
Over the years my family mined, gold, opal and sapphires. We didn't strike it rich but we persevered until my father sold our gold claims at Southern Cross in Western Australia. With the money from the claims and an inheritance my grandmother left my mother we moved to Rockhampton in Queensland and bought a pineapple plantation.
Pineapples are not gold, but that's another story.
The Mara Mysteries - Books 1, 2 and 3.
The Mara Mysteries Additional - A Weekend at Joe's
Simon writes a good mystery. You can sign up to his newsletter below.
S.J. Thiessen
Mystery crime author
Simon James (S.J.) Thiessen is a Tasmanian crime fiction author based in Hobart, where he lives with his wife Jane and two of their four children (the eldest two sons having left home to make the same mistakes Simon made at their age). After a career spent founding businesses, advising leaders, and consulting on workplace culture, Simon eventually admitted something to himself: he didn’t just want to write a novel—he wanted to be a novelist. The result are the Detective Inspector Terry Stratton mystery crimes; a growing series of Australian crime novels set firmly in lutruwita / Tasmania. Stratton is a detective who struggles with politics, distrusts authority, and prefers uncomfortable truths to convenient answers. Unsurprisingly, Simon relates. The series began with Crossing the Patriline, a prequel novel, and continues with Aether and Degrees of Retribution. While each book stands alone, the series builds a wider world of recurring characters, long grudges, and professional rivalries—where past decisions echo loudly into the present. Simon’s stories are shaped by his enduring love of classic and contemporary mysteries, and by themes he returns to often: justice and power, belonging and inclusion, dyslexia, identity, and resistance to systems that protect themselves before they protect people.
Hello Reader In my last newsletter I started the story of our trip from South Australia to Queensland back in 1969 including our encounter with the great train robber Ronald Biggs. After we dropped Ronald Biggs and the man he was travelling with off in St George we continued up the Moonie Highway. It was still raining and flood water lay everywhere to the point where it was dangerous to even drift one wheel off the bitumen in fear of being bogged or worse. Not great on a narrow road not much...
Hello Reader In my last newsletter I briefly touched on characters we meet over our lifetime and how these sometimes quirky and interesting people stay in our memories. Back in 1969 we were trapping rabbits in South Australia.Times were tough,Myxomatosis was spreading through the rabbit population like wildfire. This introduced disease wasn't only infecting the rabbits but the wildlife as well. I could tell some horror stories of the sights we saw but the authorities denied it all in their...
Hello Reader The Devil's Revenge Pre- order now live on Amazon. Release date 30th of June 2026. Some men hide in plain sight. That's what makes them dangerous. When Detective Senior Sergeant Mark Bannon is pulled from his posting in country Victoria and handed a cold case by Detective Superintendent Turner. A fourteen-year-old girl raped and murdered in an empty house for sale in Cheltenham. He inherits more than a file. He inherits a failed investigation, and the uncomfortable suspicion that...
