Candice Fox is a highly acclaimed novelist from Australia, best known for her work in the mystery, crime fiction, thriller, and suspense genres. Fox was born in Bankstown, New South Wales, and grew up in a large and unconventional family in the western suburbs of Sydney. Her father worked as a parole officer, and her mother was an enthusiastic foster-carer, which exposed Fox to tales of violence, madness, and evil at a young age. As a child, she would often hide around corners and listen to her father's work stories, which would later inspire her writing.
Fox's writing career began as a teenager, where she would write crime and gothic fiction as an escape from her home life. She was known for reading Anne Rice in church and scaring her friends with tales from Australia's true crime writers. Despite her early interest in writing, Fox failed to conform to military life in a brief stint as an officer in the Royal Australian Navy at the age of eighteen. She later turned to academia and taught high school through two undergraduate and two postgraduate degrees. Currently, Fox lectures in writing at the University of Notre Dame, Sydney, while undertaking a PhD in literary censorship and terrorism.
Candice Fox has received significant recognition for her work. In 2014, she won the Ned Kelly Award for Best First Novel for her book, Hades. The following year, she won the same award again for her second book, Eden. She has also been shortlisted for the prestigious award in 2016 and for the Davitt Award for two different novels in 2015. Fox is particularly famous for writing the detective fiction series, Archer & Bennett. She has also collaborated with bestselling author James Patterson on the second crime fiction series of her writing career, Detective Harriet Blue.