Introduction

"Complex, human characters, and a dark, meaty story, and fine writing, and a great sense of place – this is one of the best crime thrillers of the year. Sign me up as a big-time Fox fan!" ?Lee Child

Crimson Lake by Sydney-based, Ned Kelly award-winning author Candice Fox is a thrilling contemporary crime novel set in Queensland, Australia, perfect for readers of authors like James Patterson, Harlan Coben, Lisa Gardner, and Tana French.

How do you move on when the world won’t let you?

12:46: Claire Bingleystands alone at a bus stop
12:47: Ted Conkaffey parks his car beside her
12:52: The girl is missing . . .

Six minutes in the wrong place at the wrong time?that’s all it took to ruin Sydney detective Ted Conkaffey’s life. Accused but not convicted of a brutal abduction, Ted is now a free man?and public enemy number one. Maintaining his innocence, he flees north to keep a low profile amidst the steamy, croc-infested wetlands of Crimson Lake.

There, Ted’s lawyer introduces him to eccentric private investigator Amanda Pharrell, herself a convicted murderer. Not entirely convinced Amanda is a cold-blooded killer, Ted agrees to help with her investigation, a case full of deception and obsession, while secretly digging into her troubled past. The residents of Crimson Lake are watching the pair's every move . . . and the town offers no place to hide.

Editorial Review

An Amazon Best Book of March 2018: As Crimson Lake opens, former cop Ted Conkaffey is in a bad way: accused but not convicted of killing a teenager, his marriage is over, he doesn’t know when he’ll see his baby daughter again, his job is gone, and the thin blue line has turned its back on him. Alone, he spends his nights drinking in a cheap rented house in the grim suburb of Crimson Lake, listening to the sounds of angry neighbors and opportunistic teens throwing missiles at his front windows and grappling with “dark thoughts.” Even when his parole officer sets him up with a job as an investigator, it doesn’t seem like a leg up: his new boss Amanda Pharrell did time too, for murdering her best friend when they were teenagers, and Crimson Lake residents haven’t forgotten. When they go to interview the family in their first case together, Ted can only pray they don’t recognize his face from TV. Two investigators operating under this level of scrutiny and hostility is a great set up for a tense thriller and Fox does a superb job of weaving past and present murders together, setting up a literary shell game to keep the reader guessing who’s guilty and who’s innocent. And the humbled, by-the-book cop finding himself working for a damaged woman with an unorthodox approach to investigating adds an additional layer of complexity to a story that is shaping up to be a great new series. --Vannessa Cronin

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