Found

I like to give smaller authors and publishers a shot, but I also buy physical copies of books exclusively from small local bookshops. That doesn't always offer a ton of overlap, as it makes more financial sense for those places to sell the most in-demand titles, but sometimes you get lucky. This was one of those times where I saw this on a shelf somewhere, realized I'd never seen it anywhere else before, and snatched up the one and only copy they had for it.

Every short-story collection is a mixed bag, doubly so when each entry has a different author. I'll admit I had a bit of apprehension going into this because when I scanned the table of contents I realized I didn't recognize any of the contributors' names. But that's also kind of exciting in it's own way: new writers to follow if I like their stuff, right? Here, I found that while there was a central theme loosely tying them all together, the quality of the entries varied greatly. Overall the good ones outweighed the bad ones though. Rather than rattle through each of the eighteen entries, I'll just round off my top three.

3) "Summons (A Transcript)" by Ally Wilkes is presented as a stenographer's courtroom minutes of a social worker taking the stand to explain what happened in the lead-up to a family's disappearance.

2) "Accidents, Of a Sort" by Kurt Fawver: Two insurance auditors - a veteran and a rookie - are taking a break from reviewing footage of a fatal car accident, trying to determine who was at fault. While talking about this stressful career, the older coworker shows the younger one an old dashcam video that was never resolved.

1) "The Novak Roadhouse Massacre" by Alan Baxter is an unofficial police report filed by a local constable. Several distinct murders on a single night in rural Australia are pinned on one man with a spotless criminal record who died fleeing the last scene. One officer doesn't buy the official story, and does some digging around of his own.