It’s 1986 in the small town of Anderbury in England, and 12-year-old Eddie and his group of friends—Fat Gav, Metal Mickey, Hoppo, and Nicky—are just normal kids, the kind who get into minor trouble by accident, out of boredom. When a new teacher, Mr. Halloran, gives Eddie the idea of using an unwanted birthday gift of a tub of chalks as a way for his friends to leave each other messages around town in their own secret code, all is fun and games. That is, until a chalk drawing leads them straight to a dismembered body in the woods.

Thirty years later, in 2016, Eddie is all grown up and a teacher himself when an envelope containing a chalk drawing of a stick figure shows up at his house. He’s in no hurry to revisit the horrors of the past, but it seems all his friends got the same letter. Mickey insists he knows who really murdered the girl whose body was found so long ago. And when a new body appears, there is no choice except to confront the past if Eddie wants to stay alive.

Alternating between the past and the present, C. J. Tudor’s The Chalk Man is a riveting novel of suspense that reads like a cross between Stephen King and Michael Marshall Smith, and introduces an incredibly compelling new voice.