I am thrilled to welcome Candice Fox to Books, Life and Everything today and to be taking part in the Blog Tour to celebrate the publication of her latest crime novel, Crimson Lake. This is her debut novel in the UK and is set in the tropical swamplands of North Queensland. In today's guest post, Candice explains why she has decided to set Crimson Lake there. First however, let's see what others are saying about Candice and Crimson Lake book and learn a little bit more about the book:
“one of the best crime thrillers of the year,” Lee Child
a “masterful novel” Harlan Coben
and James Patterson described Candice as “a bright new star of crime fiction”
About the book
12.46: 13-year-old Claire Bingley stands alone at a bus stop
12.47: Ted Conkaffey parks his car beside her
12.52: The girl is missing…
Six minutes - that’s all it takes to ruin Detective Ted Conkaffey’s life.
Accused but not convicted of Claire’s abduction, he escapes north, to the steamy, croc-infested wetlands of Crimson Lake.
Amanda
Pharrell knows what it’s like to be public enemy no.1. Maybe it’s her
murderous past that makes her such a good 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…
Welcome to Books, Life and Everything, Candice! Thank you so much for coming along today to tell us a little about why you chose the setting of Crimson Lake.
Candice
Why Crimson Lake is set in Cairns by Candice Fox
Ted’s life in Sydney was always going to be familiar to the
readers, because the Australian metropolitan landscape has been entrenched in
fiction already. I felt like I wanted the unfamiliar experience of running away
as an adult to be similar to how it might be as a child. When I was a kid and I
threatened to run away, I never imagined what the world I would go into would
be like. There was my home, my school and my local streets, but ‘away’ was a
mystery to me, somewhere I would have to learn about and adapt to. So Ted had
to run somewhere totally out of his comfort zone and out of the reader’s
comfort zone as an Australian setting.
Another part of the choice of the tropical north as a setting
for this book comes with my own fatigue at writing about cities, and how easy
that has become for me. Writing about cities has always been my go-to; when I
was a kid I was writing shoot ‘em up gangster tales set in New York, and when I
was a teen it was vampire novels set in Paris. Then there was the Bennett/Archer
series set in my home city. It was a challenge to write about Cairns, because I
couldn’t look out my bedroom window and see and smell it, or wander out into it
easily, so I was relying on twisted up, magnified versions of it from my
memories, which suited the narrative well.
Thanks Candice Fascinating to hear how you wanted to take everybody out of their comfort zone- you certainly did!
About the Author
 |
| Penguin Random House Australia |
An award-winning author and commercial success in her native Australia, Candice’s first novel, Hades, won the 2014 Ned Kelly Award for best debut crime novel, with the sequel, Eden, winning the 2015 Ned Kelly Award for best crime novel. Candice is also co-author of the James Patterson blockbuster Never Never.
Thanks to Gemma Bareham and Arrow Books for a copy of the book and a place on the Blog Tour.
Check out the rest of the Blog Tour
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