The Blurb (from Goodreads):

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:

I’ve been reading a lot of contemporary crime in the past year, mainly by Australian women writers, but had not yet given Candice Fox a whirl. That’s only because it can sometimes be hard to know where to start with a writer that has a whole of books, and I hadn’t had time to google ‘Candice Fox books chronological order’. Because crime books should be read in order, don’t you think?

Anyway, I was in Brisbane for GenreCon, I’d read all the books I had packed, and the bookshop had only one copy of her books left: Gone By Midnight. My deep FOMO caused me to grab it, and I read it on the flight home.

What a great crime novel! Pacy, pithy, clever, full of surprises, with plenty of comic relief to help balance out the horror of a story about a missing child. Her characters were fabulously well-drawn, full of vulnerabilities and heartache, and yet also hope.

Of course, I soon realised it is part of a series, and that I really should have started at the beginning. I fully intend to now!