A Slow Fire Burning: The addictive new Sunday Times No.1 bestseller from the author of The Girl on the Train

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The central character is Laura who is a hot mess. “It’s not my fault” is her motto. As the story opens, she is seen leaving a houseboat in the early hours of the day the man who occupies the houseboat is found dead. Laura is carrying more emotional baggage than is imaginable. She’s not the only distressed female in the story. Miriam finds the dead body of Daniel, and through the story, the reader learns of her horrid past. Carla is the aunt of Daniel, and she is a grieving mother whose young son died tragically. Theo is Carla’s ex-husband; he is an author and a bit of a slippery character. Hawkins provides a map of the neighborhood with the homes of the different characters. I referred to that map often.

A Slow Fire Burning is a return to the twisty twisty murder myst'ry style that put hawkins on the map, with a large cast of unlikable, unreliable characters full of secrets and hidden agendas, carefully clipped clues and misdirection. there aren't any trains this time, but there are SEVERAL boats. Overall: maybe this book may have been promoted as contemporary fiction, I could have a chance to like it more. From the beginning of the novel, I expected something big, earth shattering, surprising will happen or something so smart will come out to fool me but none of them happened. That’s why I still hear the choo choo sound of disappointment train. One woman in her 20s suffered a brutal hit-and-run as a child that resulted in brain damage causing behavioural issues. A young man in his twenties is found stabbed to death on the houseboat where he had been living. I admit that I've always been entranced by the idea of living in one, minus the murder of course. A woman who lives in another of the boats is the one to find his body and at first glimpse she seems like the typical busy body type of person, always looking, judging. Soon though, there will be two other women involved, unreliable narrators all. There are connections between these women and the dead man, but these are uncovered slowly. Can't say I loved it but did find the characters and their motivations interesting. Tragic and frustrating in measure.Pike makes deft work of these unreliable narrators who span several generations, imbuing their voices with a defensiveness and vulnerability born from past disappointments and trauma. Miriam is forever second-guessing the judgment of strangers who she knows see her as a lonely busybody, while Laura is chaotic and brittle-sounding, convinced that none of the calamities that befall her are ever her fault. In particular, Pike captures the melancholy of the widowed Irene, whose frail appearance and occasional mishaps prompt others to condescend and patronise rather than treat her as a sentient adult. This being a Hawkins novel, the plot twists are sprinkled liberally to keep listeners on their toes, though the story is sustained by the humanity of these expertly narrated characters whose secrets are slowly brought to the surface.

I may be biased as I was expecting a book as extraordinary as ‘The Girl on the Train’ so therefore I left feeling mildly underwhelmed and wanting a hair more. Yes. If you have a success on that kind of scale, I think it is natural to feel that it is in some sense undeserved, or that one has been disproportionately rewarded for one’s efforts! But that is the nature of this sort of work, criticism and praise are subjective, earnings are not neatly related to hours worked – I had plenty of experience of being completely ignored before I found success. Paula Hawkins earned her label of a psychodramatic writer when she blew us away with The Girl on the Train. A Slow Fire Burning is an atmospheric, suspenseful, psychotic thriller that will have you gripping the edge of your seat. To say I was not confused is an understatement, but I remember having that same feeling with her first one, but yet it reels you in at a tantalizing rate of emotions that you will revel in this when your finished.Both have an unreliable narrator (Rachel and Laura) who we think might be the murderer. Both feature a small group of people with a tangled past, the loss of a child or the inability to have a child, an alcoholic character (Rachel and Angela.) Theo confronts Miriam. He thinks she’s been sending him letters, accusing him of stealing her manuscript, but then he realizes the letters are from Jeremy, the man who abducted Miriam and her friend Lorraine. All three women have many secrets and tell some lies, and ideally would like some sort of justice... or even better, revenge! Twists and turns like a great thriller should, but it's also deep, intelligent and intensely human'