A thriller rarely surprises these days. I have read so many I know the formula, I can predict most twists, and overall, while I still love the genre, there hasn’t been anything novel/unique coming my way. That all changed when I stumbled upon C.J. Tudor. I read The Burning Girls and loved it so much that I immediately embarked upon The Chalk Man, and both books were excellent.
About The Burning Girls
Welcome to Chapel Croft. Eight protestant martyrs were burned at the stake five hundred years ago. Thirty years ago, two teenage girls disappeared without a trace. And two months ago, the vicar of the local parish killed himself.
Reverend Jack Brooks, a single parent with a fourteen-year-old daughter and a heavy conscience, arrives in the village hoping to make a fresh start and find peace. Instead, Jack finds a town mired in secrecy and a strange welcome package: an old exorcism kit and a note quoting scripture. “But there is nothing covered up that will not be revealed and hidden that will not be known.”
The more Jack and her daughter Flo get acquainted with the town and its strange denizens, the deeper they are drawn into their rifts, mysteries, and suspicions. And when Flo is troubled by strange sightings in the old chapel, it becomes apparent that ghosts here refuse to be laid to rest.
But uncovering the truth can be deadly in a village where everyone has something to protect, everyone has links with the village’s bloody past, and no one trusts an outsider.
~ Synopsis from GoodReads
My Review
This book really surprised me and hooked me from the very first page (with a very unsettling exorcism), and how! It got me reading late into the night. No exaggerations, this book was 🔥 .
I don’t want to give out too many details, but I loved the narration, I loved how the supernatural elements are combined with the present-day horror. The sinister, unsettling atmosphere was fantastic, and it’s just the perfect spooky book to read on a fall/winter evening. There was some real evil in the book – and some of it was hard to digest at first.
I like to believe that people are generally good by nature, but this story goes in the opposite direction. Its premise is that some people are simply born evil. That is not a motivation for murder in my book, and normally I would have disliked The Burning Girls for that reason alone, but C.J. Tudor sold me on anyway just because the story was built so very well.
Overall, this book succeeded in the vibe that I think Paula Hawkins was trying for with Into the Water somewhat unsuccessfully.
One of the best mysteries I have read of late! Highly recommend!
The Chalk Man
In 1986, Eddie and his friends were 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 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 happened all those years ago.
~ Synopsis from GoodReads
My Review
I liked The Chalk Man; it’s beautifully written, but there are one too many similarities to Stephen King’s writing style. So many plot points took me back to the good old days of It. I wondered at first if it was just me, but there are other reviewers on the web commenting the same thing.
The Chalk Man is also quite slow. Still, I enjoyed it overall. Although the supernatural elements are not as obvious in this book, there is a very creepy vibe, and I think the chalk men motif appearing throughout the book was very well done – giving me the chills, while not being over-the-top unbelievable.
That said, I didn’t like it quite as much as The Burning Girls. Some motifs were too similar to The Burning Girls (although this is the earlier book). And like I said earlier, I just couldn’t get past the stylistic similarities with Stephen King’s writing.
Still, I’d say this was a good, solid mystery. Very atmospheric, very sad in places, and with a very satisfying conclusion.
