I went along to Sisters in Crime’s Scarlet Stiletto Awards a couple of weeks ago for an event to celebrate women’s crime writing. Our compares for the evening were authors Candice Fox and Sarah Bailey (you can find reviews from both authors on this blog). I’ve been a big fan of Candice Fox, in particular, for years. Not only is she a formidable crime writer, but she seems like a genuinely good egg, and as I discovered at the awards she is also very funny.

I purchased Candice’s most recent novel High Wire, published in September and gobbled it up in a few days. In the acknowledgements Fox says that High Wire is a kind of love letter to Lee Child and his well known character Jack Reacher.

This was bad. Very, very bad. Because whoever these guys were, they had either law enforcement or military training. 

Set in the remote desert of north east South Australia, High Wire is outback gothic crime fiction – riveting, moody and brimming with suspense, as well as a good dose of Fox humour. In a hurry to get to his dying girlfriend after the airport is closed, Veteran Harvey Buck takes the High Wire, a secret track cut through the outback from Broome to Sydney. He comes across a women, Clare Holland, whose car broke down and caught fire, and offers her a ride. A bit further down the track, the pair are ambushed, strapped into bomb vests and thrown into the back of a truck. They are driven across the desert and forced to complete a number of criminal acts.

Harvey stopped his vehicle, got out, looked all around. Saw the same thing he’d been seeing for the past three and a half hours. Emptiness. One flat black mass, slightly darker tan the black mass blanketed over it, peppered with stars and milky galaxies he’d known the name of once.

Meanwhile local copper, Senior Sergeant Edna Norris, rescues an oversized teenage boy called Talon from a man in an isolated farmhouse who had posed as a teenage girl online. While driving the youth to send him back to Adelaide, Edna receives a call to attend to a burnt out car on the High Wire. The pair find Clare’s burnt out vehicle then stumble across Harvey’s car with the body of a balaclava clad man lying beside it. The pair start to form theories about what happened and are soon pursuing the crime.

Edna started the car and put it into gear. ‘Buckle up, kid,’ she said. ‘We’re taking a little detour.’

As Clare and Harvey’s pasts unfold to reveal why they found themselves in their dilemma, Edna and Talon grow closer and work together to solve the unfolding crimes. 

But he decided, there in the dark, that he would go on, anyway. Even without strength, or fight, or a solid sense of how he could change his outcome. Because going always onward, even if it was directly towards pain, was better than the pain of lying down and wondering in his final moments what one more step could have brought him.

The things I love most about Candice’s work are her characterisation and ability to create really complex impossible plots and make them believable.