The Chalk Man

In the quiet English village of Anderbury, twelve-year-old Eddie Adams and his tight-knit group of friends invent a private code: chalk stick figures, each child drawing in their own colour to leave secret messages for the others. It's a harmless game — until, one summer in 1986, a trail of chalk figures leads them into the woods and to a discovery that will haunt them for the rest of their lives.

Thirty years later, Eddie is a schoolteacher trying to keep the past buried, when an anonymous letter arrives bearing a single chalk figure. He's not the only one; the surviving members of the old group each receive the same message. As the two timelines close in on one another, Eddie is forced back into the events of that summer and the question of what really happened — and who among them has never stopped playing the game.

C.J. Tudor's award-winning debut is a dark, tightly wound psychological thriller in the vein of Stephen King's small-town horror, braiding a coming-of-age story with a decades-spanning mystery and a narrator whose memory can't quite be trusted.