Crimson Lake by Candice Fox ** Blog Tour Author post**

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.

You can follow Candice on Twitter , on her Website  , Facebook and on Goodreads. 

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