This was my third Paula Hawkins book and while I found it somewhat slow going, the writing was superb. There are numerous characters seen leaving the crime scene reportedly by his nosey neighbor Miriam, who has a side story of her own tying the Twist and turns and complicating who did it.

Published in over fifty languages, it has been a Number 1 bestseller around the world and was a box office hit film starring Emily Blunt. Fortunately for Daniel, there is a noisy neighbor Miriam who takes detailed records of all of the comings and goings. Hawkins' third novel, after her smash debut with The Girl on the Train (2015) and a weak follow-up with Into the Water (2017), gets off to a confusing start.The title, “A Slow Fire Burning” reflects the emotional simmering of the female characters, all who have reasons for revenge. Moving between the perspectives of Straitley and Buckfast – “in his old black gown and his chalk-smudged suit, he looks like the last piece of dead skin left on a quickly healing wound” – she thinks of her new sparring partner. 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.

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. 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. The book asks the question, if you were offered the chance to right some terrible wrong that had been done to you, how far would you go?

On the night Daniel died, she went to his boat and found a notebook with drawings of her, which she took.

As if someone else wrote it, chapter 30 was my favourite one, where I asked why couldn’t have been like that throughout the book? A Slow Fire Burning is another slow burn with a lot of characters but it is so well constructed that it is worth sticking with. This is where King has always excelled, depicting the small kindnesses, cruelties and tensions that make up ordinary life.Mrs Death Misses Death by Salena Godden, Lean Fall Stand by Jon McGregor, No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood, The Turnout by Megan Abbott, Dream Girl by Laura Lippmann, Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason, The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak, Everyone Knows Your Mother is a Witch by Rivka Galchen. Sorry but I have to admit this is not one of my favorite works of the author and not one of my favorite reads of this year!