Candice Fox

We're back in Crimson Lake with the Crocs, snakes and the mossies big enough to pick you up and take you away if they ever team up.
The reverberations from the last case, Redemption Point, are still being felt. Amanda and Ted are still the most hated people in Crimson Point. This makes things just a little complicated when they are asked to assist the family of a boy who has disappeared from his hotel room. Four young boys are left to amuse themselves in one families room while the parents show more are in the restaurant downstairs. When Sara does her final hourly check at midnight only three boys are there. Where is her son? Note trusting the local police Sara appoints Ted and Amanda to help find him.

Things are complicated enough for Ted when this case arrives. He has finally managed to repair his relationship with his wife Kelly who has allowed him to spend the week with his young three year old daughter. The timing could not be worse.

The story is primarily told through the eyes of Ted and Amanda. Amanda is the loose canon in this story. Her personality fisses and sparks throughout. Setting off unexpected and unwelcome reactions. Ted is conflicted with wanting to help the family find their missing son at the same time not stuffing up his opportunity to look after his daughter.

Candice Fox is excellent with the pacing of this story. It's exhausting for the reader to have nothing but fast action when the tension is racked high all the time. She allows both Ted and Amanda to have quiet reflective times so that when the action does ratchet up it actually has more impact. The characters are believable and more importantly the secondary characters are well defined and play an integral part in the story. They are not just plonked there to keep the plot rolling along.

Who done it? How did it happen? I didn't pick it until it was right in front of me. Hell of a twist

I highly recommend the entire series. You will need to read them in order as their are spoilers for previous books in the later ones. show less

The creative plot of The Chase begins with an astonishing and successful scheme to break out every prisoner from the (fictional) Pronghorn Correctional Facility in the Nevada Desert. 653 inmates in all were set free. Right away, some 291 were rounded up on the roads to Las Vegas, Utah, or Arizona, but the most dangerous were still at large.

Trinity Parker, a US Marshal, is spearheading the team effort to contain the damage and re-arrest the escapees. The team quickly ascertains there had to show more be someone inside helping orchestrate the escape plan, and they were able to narrow down the culprit pretty quickly. But that didn’t help get the inmates back inside.

Celine Osbourne, who is the supervisor of death row, is determined to get her charges back, because the thought of what these dangerous men might do when back out in the world terrifies her. She is especially obsessed with recapturing John Kradle, sentenced to death for the murder of his family. Celine is focused on him because when she was 17, all the other members of her family were killed at a Christmas gathering by her grandfather. In her mind she has equated Kradle with her grandfather, and harbors a keen hatred for him.

In alternate chapters we follow what is happening with several of the escapees, including not only Kradle, but the truly frightening serial killer Homer Carrington; Abdul Hamsi, a failed terrorist; and Burke David Schmitz, a neo-Nazi white nationalist killer. Most of the men who got out were interested in either stealing money and making new lives, getting revenge, or finishing the crimes they were prevented from carrying out before they were incarcerated. But Kradle was determined to prove his innocence and find out who killed his family and why it happened. He starts calling Celine to enlist her in the effort. Celine in turn asks for the help of Walter Keeper, called Keeps, a con man who doesn’t hesitate to add Celine to his victims.

In a tension-filled denouement, we find out the truth about all of the characters and about their guilt or innocence.

Evaluation: Candice Fox excels in writing tense thrillers with nuanced characters, in which it is never clear who may or may not survive. This makes for very entertaining reading. show less

Eden- an intensely layered psychological mystery that will capture your attention and hold it hostage throughout. Fox's voice is strong, her characters vile, real and witty. She has an insanely graphic, and rather twisted mind, where each word is chosen carefully in order to construct this labyrinth of thoughts, characters and scenarios into a brilliant story.
You will try to figure things out as I did, but I never saw it coming, on quite a few occasions, and am thrilled to have had the show more experience. Right vs wrong is skewed throughout, and good vs evil has a different meaning in Eden. Pick up this book, lock your doors and enjoy the ride, it's absolutely fabulous. show less

I bought 'Eden' as soon as I finished 'Hades', the first book in this peculiar trilogy. It was an original and compelling read and I could see why it won the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Fiction (2014). The second book in a trilogy can often be the trickiest, the author has lost the novelty of the first book but can't give the closure of the final book but I knew that 'Eden' won the Ned Kelly Award for Best Fiction (2015) so I plunged in. I was delighted to find that 'Eden' is a rare show more thing, a second book in a trilogy that is even better than the first. 

Candice Fox avoids the second book doldrums by moving most of the action to new environments with new challenges and by focusing on deepening the reader's knowledge of each of the three main characters.

'Eden' is an outstanding novel in its own right. It has the tension, foreboding, mystery and vivid violence that I expect from a solid thriller and it has three unusual, engaging-without-being-likeable main characters who become more important than the details of the plot.

When I was reading the book, I quickly became absorbed in the story, needing to turn the pages and find out what would happen as each of the three main characters becomes more and more at risk. I didn't have any attention left for anything else.

Once the book was over and I had time to think, I was struck by the skill of storytelling and the quality of the writing. The story is told on two timelines and from three points of view.

The present-day timeline carries straight on from the events of 'Hades' but with Eden and Archer almost immediately separated when Eden is sent undercover with Archer watching from a distance. We see the present-day timeline partly through a first-person account from Archer that gives the reader access to Archer's doubts about and concerns for Eden and his internal struggles as well as the details of the case he and Eden are working. Candice Fox keeps the reader out of Eden's and Hades' heads by describing their present-day actions in the third-person limited. With Hades, this still feels personal, giving me an insight into his reactions. Eden remains an enigma. The reader sees what she sees but gets only a limited indication of her reactions and judgements and is left to guess at her emotional state. This combination adds to the tension of the story and enriches the reading experience by using different paths to disclose information and develop characters.

The historical timeline, which kicks off the book and folds into the present-day timeline at key moments is told from the point of view of a boy who cannot remember his name or his past and uses a version of the third-person-omniscient that gives the story the aspect of a fable or legend without robbing it of impact. It is a tale where the violence is frequent and vivid but where emotions are locked away tightly.

I love the way Candice Fox writes. Her range is broad and her control or tone and pace is complete.

Here is the first paragraph of the novel. It's set in the historical timeline.

The night of the boy’s murder he was working, wandering along Darlinghurst Road in the crowds of workers, picking pockets, begging, doing tricks for coins. Later the boy would think of his life in the city streets as the Winter Days, because even in the summer they seemed cold and damp, the daylight short. The skin of his feet was hard and black, but the midnight hours penetrated this husky exterior, brought a chill through the asphalt into his skinny legs. The mornings rang with wet silence and the afternoons were heavy with foreboding, the promise of darkness bringing with it yelling, laughter, running footsteps, sirens.
Fox, Candice. Eden (Archer & Bennett Thriller Book 2) (p. 1). Random House. Kindle Edition.

Starting the first sentence with "The night of the boy's murder" and the second with "Later, of his life in the city streets as the Winter Days" enticed me. It promised mystery and strangeness and a tale cleverly told.

The present-day timeline starts with Hades. The tone of prose announces his character like the notes of a leitmotiv in an opera:

HADES WOKE THINKING he’d been shot. The great weight that seemed to fall and then wrap around his chest, the noise, the pain. He’d taken a bullet before and this was how it felt. But the thump on his chest was only the cat. The pain was his old man’s bones snapping into action, the noise his perimeter alarm sounding, an old fire alarm screwed to the wall above the door. Someone had entered his property. Hades groaned and rolled onto his side, flopping out of the bed like a swollen fish. The cat weaved around his stubby ankles, suddenly full of affection after the terror of the alarm. It was usually a bitch of a thing. Hades kicked it away and slipped his thongs on.
Fox, Candice. Eden (Archer & Bennett Thriller Book 2) (p. 10). Random House. Kindle Edition.

I love the way we move from feral boy to aggressive but aching old man and how the memory of having been shot turns simile into character-building history inside a paragraph

Then we move on to Archer, the one we have the most intimate view of, the one least likely to be seen as a monster and yet the one who is often the hardest to like.

THE TELEVISION WAS on, but somehow the knocking broke through the chatter of morning programs, the laughter and music and cooking tutorials, to snap me awake. The first sensation was the wetness under my face. Cold drool. Camel mouth. The place smelled damp and reeked of kitty litter. But still bearable. I could leave it a couple more days. I sat up and felt a nudge in the small of my back. I fished around and retrieved an empty Jameson bottle. The pain – dull, heavy, everywhere.
Fox, Candice. Eden (Archer & Bennett Thriller Book 2) (p. 18). Random House. Kindle Edition.

I like that both scenes start with a man being woken to pain and yet show how different the men are.

In this book, Eden is sent undercover to a remote sheep station run by a man suspected of serial rape and murder. Going undercover requires Eden to reinvent herself as Eadie. Eden is always impeccably dressed and completely in control. Eadie is a homeless young woman on the run from an abusive husband and in control of very little. The transformation is fascinating. When Eden is Eden, we get small insights into what she likes and dislikes. Once she becomes Eadie we have almost as limited a view as that of the men monitoring the feed from her concealed body cam.

The scenes on the sheep station are intense, conveying a feral lifestyle that is always on the edge of violence. The denouement was explosive, graphic and credible both in terms of the action and the impact it had both on Eden and on Archer.

Eden as Eadie surprised me. Archer's contact with Eden and Hades is challenging him to make decisions about who he is going to be. The biggest development in the book, though, was in my understanding of Hades. He really is a complicated and very dangerous man. Even so, Eden is scarier than he is.

I'll be back for the final book, 'Fall' shortly. show less