A Slow Fire Burning

Product Information

Laura, a young woman who suffered a traumatic brain injury when she was ten, is the prime suspect in the murder of Daniel, a young man who is found dead on his houseboat. Laura’s mother had been having an affair with a man who left their house and hit Laura on his drive home. Her mother had run out to the accident and urged the man to run away so that she would not get caught cheating. Laura spent three months in a coma and then underwent a series of painful surgeries to rehabilitate her body, which never fully recovered. When she got out of the hospital, her mother left her father and Laura felt abandoned and angry. As an adult, Laura worked at a laundromat and had extreme emotional and mental problems, including poor impulse control. The night before Daniel died, she met him at a bar and slept with him. In the morning, he called her a gimp and they got into a physical fight that ended with her biting him. He left the boat and she went home, stealing his watch, but then someone else murdered him. Because of her involvement with him, Laura became the prime suspect in the detective’s case. A heartfelt memoir about race, identity and mental illness. Read by the actor himself, it makes for moving listening. 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. Inspired by David Copperfield, Kingsolver crafts a 21st-century coming-of-age story set in America’s hard-pressed rural South. A Slow Fire Burning is the latest from Paula Hawkins, the woman whose words haunt your dreams. . .We follow three women close to the deceased—an ex, an aunt, and a neighbor. Each has kindled a hot-burning anger against the man in question, and Hawkins happily fans the flames.” — Glamour

Acreeping psychological thriller about entanglement and strained family relations that spiral into viciousness...Hawkins submerges readers into the troubled lives of her leading ladies... Hawkins shapes the three women’s stories in a way that brings their simmering fears and grief to the surface.” —AV Club The book revolves around the gruesome scene of Daniel's death occurring on a London houseboat he was living in. 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. The author sets in motion a number of scenarios and vindictive reasons to commit the crime. And her brand new work “A slow fire burning” has exactly the same problems! 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. But unfortunately this book couldn’t be defined as a mystery. It looks like a contemporary fiction about crowded and very unlikable characters’ connections with each other!

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. Inside Laura's head, Deidre spoke. The trouble with you, Laura, she said, is that you make bad choices. The characters in this novel are realistically portrayed and the reader is able to form an emotional connection to them. This was my third Paula Hawkins book and while I found it somewhat slow going, the writing was superb. It was the pacing and the large cast of unlikable and unreliable narrators that bogged this one down for me a bit. Otherwise this would probably have been a 5*.

Theo Myerson and his wife Carla, who had the start of an incredible marriage, until their young son Ben died accidentally at only 3 years of age. They are both hiding enough secrets to bury any average human being. You may think you know their secrets, BUT JUST WAIT UNTIL THE ENDING!!!!!!!!!! A Slow Fire Burning is an engrossing narrative that expertly captures the complexities of human relationships. The atmosphere is dark, the small group of characters unlikable, harboring secrets and truths. The young woman Laura, a tragic past, I felt sorry for and Irene a older woman, with a big heart, the only character I actually liked. There are many misdirections which change the story in small and big ways. A book within a book which also serves to confuse. The pacing is slow, but there are constant revelations and the truths are slowly revealed.

Listen to Paula Hawkins on the Penguin Podcast

A Slow Fire Burning is a treat: utterly readable, moving in parts and saturated with the kind of localized detail that made The Girl on the Train so compelling…a return to form.” — The Guardian The police interrogated Laura, but then let her go because they did not have enough evidence to charge her. While visiting Irene, Laura noticed that Carla had left her purse in the hall of Angela’s house while she was clearing out Angela’s things. On impulse, Laura stole the purse and then took it to her home. The police searched Laura’s house and discovered a bloody knife and a shirt covered in Daniel’s blood. Well, I didn't. I thought it was clever. A new way to tell a story like that, makes you think, doesn't it?"