Gone by Midnight by Candice Fox: book review

Gone by Midnight by Candice Fox (2019) is the third novel in the Crimson Lake trilogy, set in Queensland, Australia.

Former police detective Ted Conkaffey was wrongly accused of abducting Claire Bingley, sending him into self-imposed exile in Crimson Lake in tropical Queensland. His wife Kelly has left him. But, for the first time in two years, Kelly and their three-year-old daughter Lillian are visiting him, and he can’t wait to see Lillian again.

In Crimson Lake, Ted has joined forces with the weird Amanda Pharrell who established her own private investigations agency. But she has a past too. In her late teens, Amanda was convicted of murder, but she now has a PI license, and a reputation for effectively hunting down killers.

In the White Caps Hotel, three couples and single mother Sara Farrow left their four boys, aged eight years old, in a hotel room while they went to the hotel restaurant. The parents checked on their children hourly. During the midnight check of the boys, Sara’s son Richie has vanished. `

In the hotel room next door, Martin Askin heard the boys making a lot of noise, but the hotel’s CCTV footage couldn’t provide any evidence of what happened. Distrusting the police, Sara hires private detectives Ted Conkaffey and Amanda Pharrell to help find her son.

Can the other boys provide some answers? Are they ‘misremembering’ what happened? Or are they ‘suggestible’ to their parents’ views and local rumours?

So, while Ted Conkaffey and Amanda Pharrell try to make their pasts disappear, Sara Farrow hopes for the re-appearance of her son. The investigators are in danger and risk their own lives as they get closer to the truth. This best-selling crime thriller is full of intrigue till the end.

MARTINA NICOLLS

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MARTINA NICOLLS is an international human rights-based consultant in education, healing and wellbeing, peace and stabilization, foreign aid audits and evaluations, and the author of: The Paris Residences of James Joyce (2020), Similar But Different in the Animal Kingdom (2017), The Shortness of Life: A Mongolian Lament (2015), Liberia’s Deadest Ends (2012), Bardot’s Comet (2011), Kashmir on a Knife-Edge (2010) and The Sudan Curse (2009). She lives in Paris.

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