Crimson Lake is where people with dark pasts come to disappear—and where others vanish into thin air…

Four young boys are left alone in a hotel room while their parents dine downstairs. When Sara Farrow checks on the children at midnight, her son is missing.

Distrustful of the police, Sara turns to Crimson Lake’s unlikeliest private investigators—disgraced cop Ted Conkaffey and convicted killer Amanda Pharrell. For Ted, the case couldn’t have come at a worse time. Two years ago a false accusation robbed him of his career, his reputation, and most importantly, his family. But now Lillian, the daughter he barely knows, is coming to stay in his ramshackle cottage by the lake.

Ted must dredge up the area’s worst characters to find the missing boy. The clock is ticking, and the danger he uncovers could well put his own child in deadly peril.

My Review

I’m totally bereft! What am I going to do without my daily fix of Ted Conkaffey and Amanda Pharrell while I walk the dog? 5km round the park, my new Shokz earbuds in my ears, my mind in Australia with the crocs, the mosquitoes, the swamps, and the corrupt police. Maybe not so much the corrupt police. And of course my two favourite private investigators, the geese and Celine the overweight white dog that Ted rescued after she was dumped at the shelter by the pedo in the previous book. Gone By Midnight is the third and last in the Crimson Lake trilogy. I need more.

Ted has finally managed to spend time with his three-year-old daughter Lilian without ex-wife Kelly and her boyfriend as they have gone to a yoga retreat for a few days. While Ted is investigating the disappearance of an eight-year-old boy, Lilian is babysat by Val the ‘morgue woman’. Lilian loves dog Celine and the geese. Val becomes her new Nana. Everything is fine. Ted may even find romance.

But with no trace of the missing boy, things are starting to turn weird. His mother (who has hired Ted and Amanda to find him) seems too unemotional. There is more than one suspect – but is either of them guilty? The police seem to want it to be Ted so they can hound him yet again, and Officer Fisher is obsessed with Amanda after her friend Pip was killed in the last book.

It’s all very exciting and entertaining, but it’s the characters that make the books. They are all so brilliantly written and I want to know what will happen to them – please.

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.