3.75 stars

"I don't believe in ghosts. My nan was fond of telling me, "It's not the dead you need to be scared of, love. It's the living." She was almost right. But I do believe you can still feel the echoes of bad things."

Here is my attempt at chalking out (chalk man, chalk out, get it?) what happend in the book as vaguely as possible. There won't be any spoilers, just my general thoughts and a little description of what the book is about.

Arnhill is an old village with a complicated history and an unexplainable darkness that sits heavy, with an omen of something evil, around it. When Joe recieves an email from a mysterious source, he returns home to face the long burried, but inescapable, ghosts of his past. He lies his way into teaching job at his former high school as a ploy to figure out what really happened 25 years ago to his sister - Annie - and why it is happening again. The answer rest within an infamous abandoned coal mine and with the people who were there that night when his life was changed forever.

Happiness is overrated; it’s far too short-lived, for a start. If you bought it on Amazon, you’d demand a refund. Broke after a month and impossible to fix.  Next time will try misery—apparently that shit lasts forever.

C.J. Tudor write some great thrillers. I really enjoyed her last book - the chalkman - and this one is just as good. It's a light read. Nothing to complicated. Just pure old school mystery that will keep you on ur toes. However, there is one important thing the synopsis has cleverly omitted that this book is part supernatural and part mystery/thriller.  I, personally, really enjoyed the coalition of supernatural and thriller in this book, but I understand not many people are going to enjoy it.

Plot was clevetly contrived and writing was impeccable and appropriately laden with snark and quirkiness. There were tons of insightful and funny passages that I have saved with an intention to use them in my daily life, lol. Although it's not a perfect book, I really enjoyed it. My only problem was with the ending as it didn't answer some of my questions. Author was planting seeds thoughout the book around a mystery regarding kids but those seeds didn't sprout in end. I don't mind open endings but this one could have benefited from some more explanation. 

Favorite Quotes

"The past isn’t real. It is simply a story we tell ourselves. And sometimes, we lie."

"Never trust a person whose bookshelves are lined with pristine books, or worse, someone who places the books with their covers facing outward."

"You might not be able to judge a book by its cover, but you can definitely judge the person who owns the book."

"Gloria might look like a delicate china doll. But the only doll she has anything in common with is Chucky."

"People say time is a great healer. They’re wrong. Time is simply a great eraser. It rolls on and on regardless, eroding our memories, chipping away at those great big boulders of misery until there’s nothing left but sharp little fragments, still painful but small enough to bear. Broken hearts don’t mend. Time just takes the pieces and grinds them to dust."

"There are no such things as white lies. Lies are never black or white. Only gray. A fog obscuring the truth. Sometimes so thick we can barely see it ourselves."

"Newspapers are the place where facts become stories, the Internet is the place where stories become conspiracy theories."

"There’s a line people spout, usually people who want to sound sage and wise, about wherever you travel, you can never escape yourself. That’s bullshit. Get far enough away from the relationships that bind you, the people that define you, the familiar landscapes and routines that tether you to an identity, and you can easily escape yourself, for a while at least. Self is only a construct. You can dismantle it, reconstruct it, pimp up a new you."

" Like many middle-aged men, he turns “casual clothes” into an oxymoron."

"Facebook is the place where people with no friends in real life keep in touch with people they’d never want to be friends with in real life."