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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Deliciously dark and dangerously unsettlingly, A Slow Fire Burning will give you chills with every chapter." Miriam catches Laura stealing some earrings and finding her own key, the one Miriam took. Miriam also gives her a copy of her manuscript. This is a very cerebral mystery so I wouldn’t recommend reading this after several glasses of wine, or whatever unless you reason better this way!! You will need to think, untangle story lines and understand this myriad cast of characters and convoluted but ultimately brilliantly written novel. 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. Well, I didn't. I thought it was clever. A new way to tell a story like that, makes you think, doesn't it?"

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. Daniel himself is hard to read. We begin to learn more about him, his unhappy and caustic relationship with his mother, his aunt Carla and others, but don’t really understand him even at the end. Being uprooted and having to make a new home somewhere else had a significant impact on me; I felt an outsider for many years, in a lot of ways I think I still do. Paula Hawkins Laura goes to see Irene and does her shopping. When she’s passing Carla’s house, she sees the door open and steals Carla’s tote bag. As the book begins, Laura is cleaning blood off herself. She calls her father for help but her stepmother intervenes and cuts her off. It’s unclear exactly what happened to Laura, but she has the watch of someone named Daniel.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.) 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. it also features a mystery novelist character who gives a little meta-commentary on the genre as well as roadmap to the novel itself: What did you think of this one? It was definitely a slow burn. I didn’t mind that, though I wished for a little more tension and suspense.

Who killed Daniel and why? I found it ambitious in that each character had reasons to be the murderer, depending upon the chapter. Each character endured tragedy and trauma; each has a suspicious pedigree. No one is an unreliable narrator, yet in reflecting their pasts, we wonder what the truth is. Each of us are a bit of unreliable narrators of our past, or, I should say we “color” our past to reflect what we want. What Hawkins is great at, is exposing the “shady” parts, or the “grey”.

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. Laura Kilbride – had a traumatic brain injury as a child and was with the victim the night he died. Twists and turns like a great thriller should, but it's also deep, intelligent and intensely human' I wasn’t entirely clear on the somewhat creepy relationship between Carla and Daniel. Was he just a really disturbed person who fantasized about his aunt, or did they really have a romantic relationship?