The Chalk Man by C.J. Tudor

January18 book for Poison Apple Book Club

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"Never assume.

Question everything.

Always look beyond the obvious."

"In 1986, Eddie and his friends are just kids on the verge of adolescence. They spend their days biking around their sleepy English village and looking for any taste of excitement they can get. The chalk men are their secret code: little chalk stick figures they leave for one another as messages only they can understand. But then a mysterious chalk man leads them right to a dismembered body, and nothing is ever the same.

In 2016, Eddie is fully grown and thinks he's put his past behind him, but then he gets a letter in the mail containing a single chalk stick figure. When it turns out that his friends got the same message, they think it could be a prank--until one of them turns up dead. That's when Eddie realizes that saving himself means finally figuring out what really happened all those years ago." (goodreads)


I really enjoyed this book and cannot believe it is Tudor's debut novel. One of the things I love most about a mystery thriller is being able to figure out the ending before it happens. For The Chalk Man, I figured out few, but not everything. There were several important questions that arose while reading this book, and I had a difficult time coming up with answers to them individually, let along trying to figure out how all these random events led together. And that is part of the charm of this book, do these random events all link together? Are there satisfying answers to all Eddie's questions? 

Eddie, Hoppo, Fat Gav, Mickey and Nicky use colorful chalk figures as a secret code to communicate with each other. But when Eddie notices mysterious white chalk figures beginning to appear around town, he knows someone has broken their secret code. When the group follows the white chalk figures into the woods and discover a dead body, the town is swept up in solving the murder case. Thirty years later, when Ed receives a single chalk figure letter he passes it off as a prank. But when the death of one of his childhood friends is being looked at as a murder case, Ed tries to piece together that summer in 1986 and figure out what really happened to the girl in the woods.

Ed plays a dangerous game when he starts to uncover secrets from the past, and it just might put him and everyone he cares about in danger. Who is the Chalk Man? Who is leaving the white chalk figures? Who sent the chalk figure letters? Who is the girl they found in the woods? Who killed her?  And most importantly, where is her head?

The Chalk Man is a thrilling read, trying to place all the pieces together is hard when you never really know who you can trust to tell the truth..

I highly recommend The Chalk Man to fans of Stephen King's IT and the hit Netflix original series Stranger Things.  

 

My Rating: 4.5/5 Stars