Eyewitness by another houseboat resident, Miriam leads to a young girl Laura, who seemingly had a very disturbing past and childhood resulting in her unpredictable behavior.

We have the nosy neighbour who had found the body, a young woman who’d had a recent one night stand on the victim's boat and an aunt who seems to be nursing a whole bag of resentment, for reasons we are to discover later. I’d enjoyed the author’s hugely successful mystery thriller The Girl on the Train and so despite my normal aversion to fiction set in the UK (too close to home, not escapist enough, yadda yadda yadda) I was excited to get hold of this one. A nosy neighbor, a one-night stand, and a resentful family member, all who are juggling their own secrets and hidden agendas. We are disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising. I loved the way you turned everything on its head, playing with our sympathies and empathies and all that business.Hawkins uses a little humor when describing the writing style that made Theo’s book such a success, mirroring her own style, one so successfully used in The Girl on the Train. A Slow Fire Burning book reminds me of The Great Gatsby because it is so perfectly woven together, unexpected, but it also has characters trying to do the right thing and imperfectly loving other people. The lives of the women was the interesting part of the story but again it didn’t offer anything particularly new and exciting. Succombing already to slow fire, the acidification of the paper destroying it from within, eating away at the pages, making them brittle and breakable.

The three women’s back stories are shared in flashbacks while their lives intersect as the novel builds toward its climax. Additionally, there is an old lady Irene who is Angela's neighbor and friend and who is now supported for her grocery purchases by Laura. Looking up at the bridge above the canal, she thought she might have seen someone, just for a moment, but then they were gone, and she was alone, gripped by paralyzing fear. The main suspect in Daniel’s murder is 20-year-old Laura, whose promising future was curtailed ten years ago when she was hit by a car. Although fires are usually ferocious and burn fast, I expected a fast-paced book where I would fly through the pages.Paula Hawkins bestselling debut novel The Girl on The Train, which has since been given the Hollywood treatment starring Emily Blunt, sold 23 million copies.