Gone By Midnight by Candice Fox

| ABOUT THE BOOK |

They left four children safe upstairs.
They came back to three.

On the fifth floor of the White Caps Hotel, four young boys are left alone while their parents dine downstairs.

But when one of the parents checks on the children at midnight, they discover one of them is missing.

The boys swear they stayed in their room. CCTV confirms that none of them left the building. No trace of the child is found.

Now the hunt is on to find him, before it’s too late – and before the search for a boy becomes a search for a body… 

| MY THOUGHTS |

Gone By Midnight is the third instalment in the Crimson Lake series, a fact I was unaware of when I picked this one up to read. Now, luckily, this reads perfectly well as a stand-alone but I already know I’ll be making time to read the previous two as well because I can’t for the life of me figure out how these evaded my radar.

The premise of the story reminded me somewhat of the McCann investigation. Four eight year old boys are left alone in a hotel room while their parents go out to dinner. But when one of the parents returns to check on them, one of the boys has gone missing. The remaining three boys swear to high heaven that they never left the room and CCTV confirms none of them left the building. So surely the missing boy must be in the hotel somewhere but there is no trace of him.

This is the start of an amazingly intricate and complex investigation. Eight year old boys don’t exactly make great and reliable witnesses. For the longest time, I thought I knew exactly what had happened but I was proven wrong. I do so love it when an author manages to lead me in the wrong direction. Gone by Midnight is super tense, insanely addictive and has an incredibly delicious sting in its tail. Let’s not forget the amazing Australian setting.

I must say that while the search for the missing boy is intensely gripping, it’s the characters that really drew me into this story. Especially, Ted and Amanda. These two work together as a sort of private detective team but their backgrounds are utterly fascinating. I won’t be telling you what those are because I feel you need to find that out for yourself and to get a better picture of them, I recommend you start with the first book in the series. Now, I know I said at the start this can be perfectly well read as a stand-alone and that is still the case. You get plenty of background information so you don’t feel like you’ve missed out on anything. Yet, it’s also so immensely intriguing that the urge to go back and read the previous books to get the full picture is pretty hard to resist.

I honestly can’t believe this is the first time I’ve read a book by Candice Fox. Gone By Midnight had me hooked from start to finish and was just a fabulous treat.

With thanks to the publisher for my review copy!

Gone By Midnight is available to buy!

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