Crimson Lake by Candice Fox

Publisher's Synopsis

Six minutes – that’s all it took to ruin Detective Ted Conkaffey’s life. Accused but not convicted of abducting a teenage girl, he escapes north, to the steamy, croc-infested wetlands of Crimson Lake.

Amanda Pharrell knows what it’s like to be public enemy number one. Maybe it’s her murderous past that makes her so good as a private investigator, tracking lost souls in the wilderness. Her latest target, missing author Jake Scully, has a life more shrouded in secrets than her own – so she enlists help from the one person in town more hated than she is: Ted Conkaffey.

But the residents of Crimson Lake are watching the pair’s every move. And for Ted, a man already at breaking point, this town is offering no place to hide . . .

My Review of Crimson Lake by Candice Fox

Candice Fox sure knows how to weave an interesting mystery and in Crimson Lake she pulls together a couple of the more fascinating characters as her chief protagonists. The use of troubled pasts as a key basis for their present-day lives ensures there is a great deal of emotion injected into this fast-paced story.

Ted Conkaffey has moved from Sydney to the backwater town of Crimson Lake in Queensland’s far north. His life has been turned upside down by the wrongful arrest and incarceration for the abduction, rape and stragulation of a young girl in Sydney. He was there…but he didn’t do it. But that fact hasn’t deterred public opinion or the wrath of vigilante groups. As the story opens his main aim is to disappear from the judgemental stares of others and live a quiet life.

Through his lawyer he meets up with Amanda Pharrell, a private investigator who has also suffered much the same fate as he did more than 10 years earlier. A convicted murder, she turns out to be an intriguing character, both self-assured and maybe just a little unhinged. She has a whole host of ground rules she expects Ted to follow and she loves a good rhyme.

The case they work together on involves a local bestselling author Jake Scully who got up out of bed one night, got dressed and simply vanished. The fear is that he, somehow, was taken by a croc. Whether the croc got to him while he was still alive or not forms a significant part of their investigation.

Just to make things a little more difficult for him, Ted is hounded, victimised essentially, by a couple of local cops who are intent on making it their job to run him out of town. They make frequent appearances to make his life a misery. He also notices a distinct change in Amanda’s demeanour whenever they show up too. As a reader of many a thriller, you just know that there’s a reason we’re being alerted to their overt aggression towards him, not least as a reminder that no matter where he goes, Ted’s past will always be with him.

Crimson Lake is a compelling story with imaginatively crafted main characters, a picturesque albeit dangerous landscape setting and not one but three crime cases to be solved - two from the past to go with the present case. The fact that the spectre of both Ted’s and Amanda’s pasts are hanging heavily over their heads should serve to make this a troublingly dark and moody book, but it’s actually infused with healthy dollops of humour keeping many of the sharp exchanges light and entertaining.

On the back of sympathetic characters, Candice Fox has produced a solid murder mystery containing an interesting array of unexpected twists and turns. The backstories of the main two characters provides depth and makes them more interesting which begged me to keep reading to find out more. The fact that this is the first of three books in the series has me keenly looking forward to the next one.