Crimson Lake by Candice Fox

Title: Crimson Lake

Author: Candice Fox

Genre: Crime Fiction

Publisher: Bantam Australia

Published: 18^th December 2017

Format: Paperback

Pages: 416

Price: $22.99

Synopsis: From the award-winning and #1 bestselling author Candice Fox comes an ingenious and edgy suspense novel that will keep you guessing to the very last page . . .

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.

~*~

Ted Conkaffey’s life was ruined in six minutes – that’s all it took. He’s been accused of abducting a teenage girl, but there wasn’t enough evidence to convict. Now he has been driven out of Sydney and up north to Cairns and Crimson Lake to hide. He’s determined to make a new start, but he also wants to clear his name and reconnect with his wife, Kelly and daughter, Lillian. Up here, he meets Amanda Pharrell, a private investigator who was convicted of murdering girl-next-door Lauren Freeman back in 2004. Now that she has been released, Amanda decides she wants to get together with Ted to find missing local author, Jack Scully, whose life potentially has more secrets than Amanda and Ted put together. As the most hated people in town investigate, the locals slowly start to lash out, and embark on a vigilante campaign to drive Ted out of town – and nobody wants to hear what Ted has to say in his own defence. So not only does Ted need to help Amanda find Jack, but he is also consumed by the mystery that surrounds her and Lauren’s death, and his own determination to hide – when even the local cops are hellbent on driving him out of town.

This is a novel that is filled with tension – the tension of Ted and his past, tension between him and Amanda as they work together, and Ted senses that there is something more to her than everyone lets on, the tension of the crime, and the tensions of everyone linked to Lauren Freeman’s murder. Then there is the tension of the local cops constantly following Ted, often without provocation and whilst he is simply going about his life, trying to remain under the radar. Tension with the truth, and everyone in Ted’s life now and before – basically, lots of tension that could be overdone but in this novel, is pulled off so well that there are times that some of the tensions fade into the background until they need to come to the surface as the story ebbs and flows between Amanda’s past and Ted’s past, whilst still giving the main crime the space it needs.

Each suspect is presented carefully, and hints are dropped through the letters interspersed throughout the narrative – which, on one hand, start to lead the reader, Ted, and Amanda in one direction. We’re slowly pulled along as two cases emerge and start to form the story – though they are separate. In this sense, we get to understand more about Amanda and what drives her – and the secrets that many people have been hiding for about ten years – secrets that could shed light on what happened to Lauren Freeman. Ted is just as determined to find out more about what really happened to Lauren as he is to clear his name and find out about Jake Scully.

Like any good crime story, the place is as much a character as Ted and Co. I felt like Crimson Lake and Cairns came to life wholly and completely, evoking various threats and unknowns, as well as the lurking shadows, the small-town mentality that catapults Ted into a world where he feels like he can’t go anywhere. Where someone gets wind of a rumour and it catches fire and takes off, getting so far out of control that nothing can stop the rumour mill and vigilantes trying to drive Ted away from town, so he is unable to do his job. These conflicts added to the story, shedding some light on human nature and the warped way people can assume the worst – and what happens when they feed into the stories they are fed, rather than the truth.

It plays with the idea that the media warps things to their advantage and rightly so, Ted is pissed off at journalists – you can’t blame him. Overall, I think all the threads of the story were placed delicately and purposefully, so that we found out what we needed to know at the right time, and towards the end, where the stakes were ramped up, it felt like everything was unravelling quickly, and I kept hoping things would work out for everyone the way it should – justice and truth. I did like the way the book ended with a hint that there would be more to come – and I am hoping to get the sequel soon!

I also liked that the main characters in this had pasts that made them seem questionable, but there was definitely a sense that everyone had got something wrong about them. That they had been judged too quickly on what those in power had determined. Ted was sympathetic because he was so constant – his story never changed, his sense of self and what he knew he had done never changed. I think this made his story understandable. It was an interesting way to carry off a crime novel, with a bit of a twist in who the characters were, and steering away from the stereotypical detectives we often see in detective fiction.