The Chalk Man by C.J. Tudor @cjtudor @CrownPublishing #bookreview #bestof2018

TGIF bibliophiles!

We are heading to the end of the year so I thought I’d share with you some of my fave reads of 2018! Now technically I read this in 2017, but the book came out in 2018 and this was one of my very first blog posts so probably only like three people saw it!😂

Love this book and I’m excited to share my review with you all again! And I cannot wait to read her next book “The Hiding Place” that is sitting on my Kindle just waiting for me to have a minute, along with 1000 other books😉 at least they aren’t lonely!

OK without further ado….

The Chalk Man by C.J. Tudor

About the Book

The must-read thriller of 2018. This riveting and relentlessly compelling psychological suspense debut will keep readers guessing right up to the shocking ending.

In 1986, Eddie and his friends are just kids on the verge of adolescence. They spend their days biking around their sleepy little 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.

My Thoughts

WOW! I cannot believe this is this authors debut book…. it was just so extremely well thought out, the characters were well-developed, the pacing of the plot was perfect, I really just can’t think of anything wrong with this book….

The story is told from the perspective of Ed…. with two different timelines his present life as a teacher in 2016 and his 12-year-old memories in 1986….

Ed and his buddies find a dead body in the woods, and the murder has never quite been solved (at least not in Ed’s mind)…. The boys had used chalk drawings to communicate with one another back in the day…. so when Ed receives a drawing and a piece of chalk in the mail, he begins his quest to figure out what really happened all those years ago…. I don’t want to say any more than that and ruin it… just know you will go on a wonderful adventure with Ed filled with twists and turns and revelations you never will see coming…..

In addition to this fantastic mystery filled with these wonderful characters, was the nostalgia of the 1980s….as somebody who spent all of her teenage years in the 80s, I thought the author did such an amazing job of making me long for those good old days…. A time when you could ride your bike to the playground, hang out with your friends all day, and didn’t need to come home until the street lights came on…. I didn’t grow up near woods, I never found a dead body, but this book did definitely make me feel a little nostalgic for my childhood….

Can’t wait to see what this author has in store for us next!

*** thank you to Net Galley and the publisher for a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review ***

Enjoy,

Berit