Candice is an award-winning crime and thriller writer. Her latest novel is The Murder Inn, her eighth book in collaboration with bestselling author James Patterson. Her other recent novels include Fire With Fire and The Chase, an electrifying cat-and-mouse thriller set in the Nevada desert, which was the winner of the Best Crime Book in the 2022 Ned Kelly Awards. With James Patterson, she is also the author of 2 Sisters Detective Agency, Gathering Dark, The Inn, Hush Hush, Liar Liar, Fifty Fifty, Never Never and Black & Blue. Described as “a brutal, action-packed and really hard-edged novel about a crime set in a FIFO mine in the outback,” Never Never hit number 1 in the New York Times bestseller list and around the world.
Set in far north Queensland, Candice’s Crimson Lake trilogy is a series of edgy suspense novels. The books were published by Penguin Random House Australia, starting with Crimson Lake in 2017 (now a hit TV series called Troppo), followed up by Redemption Point in 2018, and the final instalment, Gone by Midnight, in 2019.
Candice's novel Hades won the prestigious Ned Kelly Award in 2014. Its sequel, Eden, was published in January 2015 and also won the Ned Kelly Award in 2015. Book three in the series, Fall, was released in late 2015. Hades and Eden are international bestsellers – already translated into four languages.
Candice has two undergraduate and two postgraduate degrees. Her Honours degree is in Creative Writing, and she holds a Masters in Writing, Editing and Publishing. She is passionate about the genre of crime writing. Growing up in a large, eccentric family from Sydney’s western suburbs, she is the daughter of a parole officer at one of Sydney’s biggest prisons and an enthusiastic foster-carer. She spent her childhood listening around corners to tales of violence, madness and evil as her father relayed his work stories to her mother and older brothers. As a cynical and trouble-making teenager, her crime and gothic fiction writing was an escape from the calamity of her home life. She was constantly in trouble for reading Anne Rice in church and scaring her friends with tales from Australia’s wealth of true crime writers. She started raiding her mother’s true crime collection as a young girl and quickly became addicted to the dark side. Bankstown born and bred, she failed to conform to military life in a brief stint as an officer in the Royal Australian Navy at age eighteen. At 20, she turned her hand to academia and now teaches creative writing.
