A Slow Fire Burning is true to its name. It’s a slow burn mystery built around a pernicious fire of resentment and pain. This is Paula Hawkins’ third novel in the thriller genre following Into the Water (2017) and her smash-hit debut psychological thriller, The Girl on the Train (2015) which was also adapted into a film starring Emily Blunt. Akin to The Girl on the Train, this novel too has a host of complex and broken characters.

The primary thrust of the story is the search for the murderer of Daniel Sutherland, a 23-year-old man stabbed to death on a houseboat. The cast of suspects include: Laura Kilbride, a troubled 20-year-old girl who spent the preceding night with the victim; Miriam Lewis, a nosy, middle-aged loner who lives on a houseboat moored close to the victim’s; the young man’s aunt, Carla Myerson; and Daniel's uncle, Theo Myerson who appears to have his own secrets.
Hawkins tosses in the additional element of the accidental death of the victim’s lonely alcoholic mother, Angela, just two months before his own. It will have you pondering connections between the two deaths and whether they could be related.
I found the opening of the novel is a bit bumpy with a new POV character being introduced in each of the initial three chapters without giving the reader any real sense of who they are. If Paula Hawkins was looking to create an air of dissonance and confusion, she succeeded.
Stylistically, this is a story with multiple POV characters (Miriam, Laura, Carla and Irene) giving us an insight into their mindsets and emotions while also setting the stage for deception, lies of omission or at the very least, varied perspectives of the truth. The back and forth in the timelines of the characters' stories reveal past pain, trauma and perhaps, more crucially from the standpoint of the mystery at hand, motivations to commit a murder. The constantly bobbing narrative structure and the twists in the plot are reminiscent of a boat rocking in shallow waters.
Hawkins is clever in her use of stock characters like the harmless, confused old woman in Irene or Laura, the mentally-unstable young woman with a history of physically lashing out. It’s the sort of stuff that encourages jumping to conclusions based almost solely on assumptions and stereotyping, allowing the author to use our minds to create red herrings out of ordinary character traits.
Paula Hawkins employs the technique of nesting a story within another to flesh out part of a character’s backstory, set up a portion of the climax and raise questions about plagiarism in literary circles. The nested story and its implications work well enough and add to the tension in A Slow Fire Burning.
The frayed threads of family torn apart by a tragedy in the past which changed for ever the lives of everyone involved is an idea running through the novel. Speaking of the past, trauma is part of almost all the characters’ life stories and very much informs their personalities and choices in the present.
Even so, none of these characters came across as particularly likeable or even sympathetic. Not even Laura who, by far, has the worst luck of the lot. I put this lack of sympathy down to her lack of agency and her constant sense of her own victimhood. She never seems to take responsibility for her own actions. It’s always someone else’s fault. As a result, her misfortunes fail to evoke the kind of sympathy a more likeable character would have received.
The theme that comes across most strongly in this novel is that hurt people hurt people. You might think I’m giving away a clue. I’m not, because this is a novel packed choc-a-bloc with damaged characters who end up hurting other people. A Slow Fire Burning explores the destructiveness of trauma and how it ends up snowballing into even worse consequences.
Is A Slow Fire Burning worth a read? That’s for you to decide. If you do pick it up, be prepared to read on through a sluggish opening which may leave you wondering what’s going on. Don’t expect a great deal of pace until the last few chapters, which have rather convenient revelations falling over each other to help the reader arrive at the identity of the killer. Which, in itself, is not that surprising. You’ll probably see it coming.
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