Candice Fox's Gone by Midnight (part of the Crimson Lake series) is a dark thriller about a boy who goes missing and the race to find him alive.
Richie Farrow is a preteen on vacation having a sleepover with three other kids. The parents are all in the hotel restaurant having drinks while the kids watch movies in one of the family's rooms. Then Richie goes missing, but none of his pals know what happened to him, claiming he just disappeared.
The local police rush to find Richie. But Richie's mother has been accused of mistreating her children in the past and fears her record will make her a suspect. She hires Ted Conkaffey, a former cop who had to resign from the force amid suspicions he's a pedophile. Ted was cleared of all charges, but public and police opinion says otherwise. And hiring Ted means hiring his partner, Amanda Pharrell, a convicted killer. The police hate Amanda and become more focused on stopping her and Ted from finding Richie than working together to find the boy.
Gone by Midnight's central mystery is propelled by the solid character development of just-trying-to-put-his-life-back-together Ted and scrappy, mouthy and smarter-than-everyone-else Amanda. Their relationship is never easy, but always electric as they struggle with personal problems while on the trail of a stone cold, unexpected villain. The story veers slightly off course in having the police ignore all the evidence clearing Ted and portraying them as simpleton bullies motivated solely by innuendo. Luckily, the misstep doesn't derail the jaw-dropping reveal of what happened to Richie. --Paul Dinh-McCrillis, freelance reviewer