When former police detective Ted Conkaffey was wrongly accused of abducting Claire Bingley, he hoped the Queensland rainforest town of Crimson Lake would be a good place to disappear. But nowhere is safe from Claire’s devastated father.

Dale Bingley has a brutal revenge plan all worked out – and if Ted doesn’t help find the real abductor, he’ll be its first casualty.

Meanwhile, in a dark roadside hovel called the Barking Frog Inn, the bodies of two young bartenders lie on the beer-sodden floor. It’s Detective Inspector Pip Sweeney’s first homicide investigation – complicated by the arrival of private detective Amanda Pharrell to ‘assist’ on the case. Amanda’s conviction for murder a decade ago has left her with some odd behavioural traits, top-to-toe tatts – and a keen eye for killers . . .

For Ted and Amanda, the hunt for the truth will draw them into a violent dance with evil. Redemption is certainly on the cards – but it may well cost them their lives . . .

My Review

As soon as I finished book one I downloaded book two from Borrowbox. Then I started listening straight away. When I finished it I downloaded book three.

I love this series and I love the narrator Lani Tupu. In fact he could be one of my favourite narrators ever. He speaks as Ted in the first person, while Amanda is narrated in the third person. Which brings me onto the characters themselves. Ted is just an ordinary guy, very tall, dark and supposedly handsome. He was a police officer with the drug squad in Sydney, Australia, until he was arrested for the abduction and rape of 13-year-old Claire Bingley that is. He lost his job, his wife, his daughter and his freedom. After eight months and insufficient evidence, he was released, and moved north to a remote house in the crocodile-infested wetlands of Crimson Lake.

But even though he is innocent, trial by media and the public is worse than the courts. Ted is harassed, beaten and threatened, by vigilantes and the police. But now we have someone else out to get him – Claire Bingley’s father Dale – because if Ted can’t find the real perpetrator, Dale will exact his own revenge. There are those who believe in Ted’s innocence, but they need proof.

In the meantime private investigator Amanda Pharrell, who spent eight years in prison for the murder of a teenage friend, has employed Ted as her sidekick. In Redemption the pair are investigating the killing of two bar staff at the Barking Frog Inn. For Detective Inspector Pip Sweeney, it’s her first homicide investigation and Amanda could be a help or a hindrance. Because Amanda doesn’t have an off button, she says it as it is, which is often inappropriate.

This is one of the best series I have read in years. I’ll be devastated to say goodbye to Ted and Amanda (not to mention Woman and the baby geese), but at least I have one more book to go before I need to.

About the Author

Candice Fox is the middle child of a large, eccentric family from Sydney’s western suburbs composed of half-adopted and pseudo siblings. The daughter of a parole officer and an enthusiastic foster-carer, Candice spent her childhood listening around corners to tales of violence, madness and evil as her father relayed his work stories to her mother and older brothers.

As a cynical and trouble-making teenager, her crime and gothic fiction writing was an escape from the calamity of her home life. She was constantly in trouble for reading Anne Rice in church and scaring her friends with tales from Australia’s wealth of true crime writers.

Bankstown born and bred, she failed to conform to military life in a brief stint as an officer in the Royal Australian Navy at age eighteen. At twenty, she turned her hand to academia, and taught high school through two undergraduate and two postgraduate degrees. Candice lectures in writing at the University of Notre Dame, Sydney, while undertaking a PhD in literary censorship and terrorism.