Tuesday, January 16, 2018

8. The Chalk Man by C. J. Tudor

read on my iPhone/Kindle/Book/Audible
2018 Crown Publishing Group
280 pgs.
Adult Mystery, back & forth in time, 1986 and present
Finished 1/16/18
Goodreads rating:  3.91 - 5066 ratings
My rating:  4.5
Setting:  small touristy town in the Cotswalds, England, 1986 and present

First line/s:  "Start at the beginning.  Problem was, none of us ever agreed on the exact beginning."

My comments:  There were some bits that did drag along a little, but otherwise this book was really difficult to put down.  I listened to it on Audible, and it was narrated with n incredibly wonderful British accent and voice.  Easy to understand.
     Ed Adams was 12 years old in 1986, and spent as much time as he could riding his bike around and playing in the woods and playground with his "gang," his four good friends.  Thirty years later he sets out to come to terms with the mysterious happenings of that time.  Switching between 1986 and 2016, we watch the whole story unfold in a totally fascinating way.  Many of the "surprises" are not so surprising, and Tudor includes one whopper of an ending.

Goodreads synopsis: 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.

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