With huge thanks to Penguin Random House and C.J. Tudor, I received a copy of this in exchange for an honest review.......
It's 1986 and 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, these little chalk stick figures they leave for each other as messages only they can understand. But then a mysterious chalk man leads them right to a dismembered body, and nothing will ever be the same.
Thirty years later, Eddie is a fully grown man and thinks he's put his past behind him. But then one day he gets a letter in the mail which contains a single chalk stick figure. When it turns out his other friends got the same messages, they think it could be a prank until one of them turns up dead. That's when Eddie realises that saving himself means finally figuring out what really happened all those years ago.
I didn't like this, I LOVED The Chalk Man. It was cleverly constructed, I was completely gripped from the start especially that prologue, I was left open mouthed to be honest (haha)! It was sharp, witty and it was expertly alternated between flashbacks and the present day and that ending......wow talk about pulse pounding. As I was reading it, it brought me back to the late 80's like in the book and reminded me of hanging around with my friends and what we used to get up to as kids, going off on the bikes for what we hoped was going to be an adventure. They were the best days of my life as a kid. It also reminded me of a bit of The Goonies and Stand By Me thrown into the mix with how those kids used to go off for what they hoped was going to be an adventure, yet they'd get into trouble instead. I don't want to say anything else apart from that as I don't want to ruin anything for anyone but go and pick up a copy, you won't regret it.
HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
The Chalk Man is available in all good bookshops, libraries and on Kindle where it is currently £4.99 at the time of publication if this review.
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