-
Access Our
Best Book Club
Books of 2025!
Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio
Book Reviewed by:The must-read thriller of 2018, this riveting and relentlessly compelling psychological suspense debut weaves a mystery about a childhood game gone dangerously awry that 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.
How can you not be intrigued when the first sentence of a book starts: "The girl's head rested on a small pile of orange-and-brown leaves." The mystery pulled me in but it was the earnest, honest voices that got my vote...continued
Full Review
(817 words)
This review is available to non-members for a limited time. For full access,
become a member today.
(Reviewed by First Impressions Reviewers).
In C. J. Tudor's thriller The Chalk Man, twelve-year-old Eddie and his friends create a secret language using stick figures drawn with chalk. The story takes place in 1986, but of course chalk games have been around for a lot longer than that.
Chalk has too. The word chalk comes from the latin calx, which means limestone. Limestone is composed primarily of the shells and skeletons of marine animals that first accumulate as a sediment and then, over millions of years, turn to stone. This limestone is, in essence, chalk.
Chalk was used all the way back in prehistoric times to draw on cave walls; and, paired with a piece of slate, had been used for centuries as a temporary way to record information, not just for students but also in ...
This "beyond the book" feature is available to non-members for a limited time. Join today for full access.
If you liked The Chalk Man, try these:
by Dan Vyleta
Published 2017
"Smoke is an addictive combination of thriller, fantasy, and historical novel, with a dash of horror. It's chilling and complex and amazingly imaginative." - Marilyn Dahl, Shelf Awareness
by Stephanie Kuehn
Published 2016
Trust nothing and no one as you race toward the explosive conclusion of the gripping psychological thriller Complicit from Stephanie Kuehn, the William C. Morris Award--winning author of Charm & Strange.
.gif)
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people ...
Click Here to find out who said this, as well as discovering other famous literary quotes!
A.J. Finn, author of The Woman in the Window
Utterly hypnotic. The Chalk Man is a dream novel, a book of nightmares: haunted and haunting, shot through with shadow and light - a story to quicken the pulse and freeze the blood. A dark star is born.
