A Slow Fire Burning

Product Information

We also are given glimpses into small segments of a best selling mystery written by one of the characters. This was my third Paula Hawkins book and while I found it somewhat slow going, the writing was superb. With some truly remarkably complex yet realistic characterisations of people across many generations; intriguing, beguiling and most of all interesting, even after finishing the book I want to know more about them. It took a while to lace all the plot threads together and I enjoyed the second half more than the first, but overall I was gripped. It’s a saying well-known to those recovering from destructive relationships, and it’s also the theme of the book.

Her clarity does not take away from the book’s rewards; rather, it feels like everything falls into place the way it should. A good everyday thriller / mystery that didn’t quite hit the mark on this occasion but I do like this author. The author decided to create a slow burn mystery which could be helpful to build high tension and increase the expectations of the readers as the pace gets faster at the second half. The lives of the women was the interesting part of the story but again it didn’t offer anything particularly new and exciting. Underneath the blood, all that blood, there was something else, something older, sweet and rank, like lilies left too long in the vase.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. Other readers have said they thought the twist at the end was great, but it fell completely flat for me. The police are quite bamboozled and have to finally rely on an unexpected player to catch the killer.

The smell and the look of him, impossible to resist, his beautiful dead face, glassy eyes framed by long lashes, plump lips drawn back from even, white teeth. The toilet paper around her forearm bloomed scarlet, her limb throbbing gently as the blood pulsed out of her. But her newest thriller, A Slow Fire Burning, may be the one that haunts readers long after they’ve finished it. hawkins' debut thriller The Girl on the Train came out hot on the heels of the film-adaptation of Gone Girl, when the psych suspense market was craving MORE LIKE THIS, PLEASE, and it became a runaway bestseller that everyone either loved or loved to hate, but its success ushered in a WAVE of twisty suspense novels trying to hitch a ride aboard the gone girl on the (gravy) train, so many of which unabashedly featured the word "girl" or "woman" in their titles.

While the structure of the novel is a murder mystery, the killer’s identity is almost the least interesting aspect of the book. 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. A narrowboat is not a comfortable environment for a tall man, and this was a very tall man, with a head like a cue ball and a perturbed expression, as though heÕd been expecting to do something else today, something fun, like taking his kids to the park, and now he was here with her, and he wasnÕt happy about it. However, the last half of the book was extremely entertaining and had some twists that I was not quite expecting. Succombing already to slow fire, the acidification of the paper destroying it from within, eating away at the pages, making them brittle and breakable.