When physicist Rachel discovers her five-year-old daughter drawing impossibly accurate nuclear-era equations in sidewalk chalk, she reaches for the only tools she trusts: documentation, research, and reason. But the deeper she investigates, the clearer it becomes that this is no childhood trick and no clinical mystery. The diagrams belong to Lev Kaplan, a forgotten Manhattan Project physicist who tried to stop a catastrophe and spent the rest of his life carrying the weight of being ignored. As Rachel follows the trail of chalk marks, sleep-talking, and buried history, she is forced to confront a truth science cannot measure: some spirits do not return for vengeance, but for witness, absolution, and the chance to finally lay down their grief. Quietly devastating and deeply original, Chalk is a haunting literary paranormal story about memory, guilt, motherhood, and the dead who remain until someone finally understands what they were trying to say.
Fiona Mapleton writes paranormal cozy mysteries that celebrate found family, impossible love, and protagonists who solve the unsolvable. The Thornfield Hollow Mysteries feature Mara Westfield, a blind medium who teams up with the ghost of a 1952 murder victim to solve cold cases and catch killers. When not writing about ghosts and small-town secrets, Fiona can be found enjoying her two rough collies, drinking too much coffee, and plotting the perfect murder (on paper, of course).View all by Fiona Mapleton
