Seven parents go to dinner in a hotel restaurant, leaving their four young sons eating pizza and watching movies in one of the rooms upstairs. A parent checks on them every hour. All goes well until Sara Farrow checks at midnight and her son, Richie, is missing. The boys say they never left the room and CCTV footage confirms he didn’t leave the hotel. But there’s no trace of him.

Although the police investigate, Sara engages the unlikeliest private investigators in Crimson Lake: disgraced former cop Ted Conkaffey and convicted killer Amanda Pharrell. Despite the hostility towards the pair from the local police, Ted and Amanda take on the case and soon start uncovering motives and discrepancies in evidence. Throw in a police officer with a specific grudge against Amanda, Ted’s strained relations with his ex-wife and a potential bikie-police gang war and you have all the ingredients for a fast-paced, well-plotted thriller.

Ted is one of Australia’s most hated men as a (wrongly) accused paedophile, while Amanda was convicted as a teenager of murdering another teenager. They are flawed yet likeable characters and their personal stories are as interesting as the crime being investigated.

The steamy tropical weather of Cairns, with mosquitoes and crocs in the swamps, is almost a character in itself.

This is the third book in Candice Fox’s ‘Crimson Lake’ series and the first I’ve read. There’s enough backstory from the previous novels that this can be read as a stand-alone novel, although I’m now keen to read the first two books in the series.

Reviewed by Melinda Woledge