To those other wonderful publishing people all across the world who have joined the team, I owe you just as much. Some of you include Lisa Gallagher, Lou Ryan, Jerry Kalajian, Kristin Sevick, Linda Quinton, Michaela Hamilton, Thomas Wortche, Susan Sandon, Selina Walker, and the rest of you know who you are.

Thank you to my fellow author buddies Adrian McKinty and James Patterson for always being ready to lend an ear.

All my love and thanks to my readers all over the world, who never leave me feeling lonely or unappreciated. I have treasured every review, letter, and comment, and it has been so wonderful meeting some of you in real life.

And as always, to my wonderful Tim. Thank you for being there whenever I needed you, word by word and page by page. You are a true delight in my life.

Excerpt: Gone by Midnight

Read on for a preview of

Gone by Midnight

By

Candice Fox

Available in March 2020 by Tom Doherty Associates

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A Forge Hardcover ISBN 9781250317582

Copyright © 2020 by Candice Fox

The real trouble came at midnight.

Martin Askin had arrived in Cairns at five o’clock in the afternoon and checked into room 607, dumping his bags on the floor and marching to the windows to yank down the blinds. He’d stood in the room in the dim light, surveying the crisply made bed and the desk neatly arranged with the room service menu, daring there to be some sign of trouble. A forgotten bar of soap in the immaculate bathroom. An unemptied bin.

His plane had sat inexplicably on the tarmac at LAX for forty-five minutes before takeoff, and again for half an hour at Sydney Airport, adding more than an hour onto an already seventeen-hour haul in economy. A flight attendant had spilled hot tea in his lap somewhere over the Pacific, and the plane’s toilets had been malfunctioning, filling the back half of the plane with a wretched stench. His taxi driver from Cairns Airport had got lost for ten minutes on the drive to the hotel, and at the reception desk the computer had frozen just before his key could be assigned.

If one more thing went wrong, Martin Askin was going to lose it.

Everything in the room seemed fine. He’d shed his clothes, showered, and slipped, groaning, between the cool, starchy sheets.

At 5:31 p.m., the door to room 608 had slammed. Knocking, bashing sounds, the unmistakable near-hysterical laughter of overactive young boys—a bunch of them. Martin had resisted the urge to burst into tears from exhausted rage. He’d pulled the pillow over his head and gone back to sleep.