The Chalk Man by CJ Tudor
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.
Expertly alternating between flashbacks and the present day, The Chalk Man is the very best kind of suspense novel, one where every character is wonderfully fleshed out and compelling, where every mystery has a satisfying payoff, and where the twists will shock even the savviest reader.
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Read an excerpt at Penguin Random House
After reading the blurb for The Chalk Man, I was hoping for a creepy and engrossing read. The prologue does have that element, but it quickly went downhill from there. The story is rather dry and the pacing is extremely slow, to the point that it almost drags much of the time. So much of the book is dedicated to character and location descriptions that I found myself quite a ways in and still wondering when the suspense would actually start. I could have been okay with some character description had there been any characters that were likable enough to make me want to know more about them, but that wasn’t the case. By the time Eddie and company finally found the body, there wasn’t much in the way of suspense as the conclusion was way too easy to guess. The biggest issue for this reader is the complete suspension of belief required for this tale. One example is our narrator, Eddie, telling the story by going back and forth between 2016 and 1986. The changes in tense were a minor irritation, but the thing that had this reader’s eyes rolling was the sheer number of details that Eddie was able to recall after thirty years. Major events are one thing, but to remember lengthy conversations and even what people were wearing on any given day is a big stretch. Then, as the story slowly progresses, it isn’t just about the murder of one girl. There are several little side mysteries to be solved, each with their own little twist. Sadly, as these revelations trickled in, they really weren’t all that surprising and made the conclusion more convoluted than anything else. I actually set this one aside several times, but I did finally finish the book, more out of a mild curiosity to see if I was right than anything else. In the end, I found myself disappointed in this not so thrilling thriller, and I can’t say that it’s one I would recommend.
**ARC provided by Blogging for Books and Penguin Random House
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
C. J. TUDOR lives in Nottingham, England, with her partner and three-year-old daughter. Over the years she has worked as a copywriter, television presenter, voice-over, and dog walker. She is now thrilled to be able to write full-time, and doesn’t miss chasing wet dogs through muddy fields all that much. The Chalk Man is her first novel.
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