This was a well written story that was well plotted with a good constant pace. Almost all the characters were damaged but not very likeable and unfortunately I just didn’t engage with any of them. The lives of the women was the interesting part of the story but again it didn’t offer anything particularly new and exciting. I loved the authors other book I read ‘Girl on the train’ which was much more enjoyable. Theo confronts Miriam. He thinks she’s been sending him letters, accusing him of stealing her manuscript, but then he realizes the letters are from Jeremy, the man who abducted Miriam and her friend Lorraine. The first half of the book would have easily been rated a 2 or 3 stars, just average if not a bit overly complex. However, the last half of the book was extremely entertaining and had some twists that I was not quite expecting. At the last half of the book, it was revealed why the book was so complex. One of the most unpredictable and saddest characters in the book is Laura. Deeply damaged mentally and physically in a car accident and left abandoned by her mother and father. Her life is complicated and scarred by a number of abusive events. She confides and cared for by Irene, another character with a tie-in and side story.

Can't say I loved it but did find the characters and their motivations interesting. Tragic and frustrating in measure. Carla recalls that the year before Angela died, Daniel turned up on her doorstep, upset. She let him stay the night but awoke to find him sketching her naked. Then after Angela’s death, she found some letters written by Angela to Daniel’s father, saying how much she hated Daniel.

Did Daniel really lure Ben to his death or was that aspect of his graphic novel just a manifestation of his guilt? When a devilishly handsome man is found brutally murdered on his houseboat, police wonder who could have committed something this gruesome. While trying to stitch together his complicated relationships, investigators are left with three women who just might've had the motive to kill. But which one has blood on her hands, and what led her to do it? As secrets swirl and lies unravel, the town tries to get to the bottom of the murder before it's too late. A chilling story that'll leave you with more questions than answers, A Slow Fire Burning gives the term "thriller" a whole new meaning. With unexpected characters, unforeseen consequences, and unusual connections, Hawkins's new book is a bloody masterpiece that's darker than it appears. Standout Quote From the first sentence to the last, this explosive, startling novel grabs you by the throat and doesn't let go. Fiendishly clever' The police notify Carla and Theo, Daniel’s aunt and uncle, about Daniel’s death. Theo says that very early on the morning the body was discovered he saw a girl near Daniel’s boat with blood all over her.

Jealousy and deceit are the catalyst for this powerful book. With a number of unlikeable characters that are complicated and deemed as troubling, it was hard to cheer for any of them. Theo and Carla have an unhealthy marriage that appears on and off due to an accidental death of their 3 year old son left in the care of her sister Angela and her son Daniel. Angela allows her bad habits to interfere with the love and care for her son... revealing a terrible cycle of child neglect. 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.)

Laura denies killing Daniel. The police find Daniel’s watch in Laura’s bathroom and take her to the police station for questioning. They mention that she was recently charged with stabbing another person with a fork. Laura has had issues since she was hit by a car at age ten. and left with a traumatic brain injury. Since then she has problems with memory, anger management and impulse control. In chapter 33 a dog is killed. Although there was no suffering, I know that some readers will want to skip it.

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 Growing up where I did was a big part of why I wanted to become a journalist, so in a roundabout sort of way it probably did affect my writing style. It certainly affected my perspective, in all sorts of ways, but I suppose the thing I’m most conscious of is not so much where I grew up, but the feeling of relocating from one place to another at a formative time. 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. it also features a mystery novelist character who gives a little meta-commentary on the genre as well as roadmap to the novel itself: 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. 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*.Overall, I am greatly looking forward to reading this book again. It has the complexity of The Great Gatsby - everything was set up perfectly and was surprising at the end. However, the greatness of this novel is not apparent in the first half of the book. The narrative also includes excerpts that I think are supposed to be from Theo’s book, which is based on Miriam’s real experience. I am not including these in the summary. In short, Miriam and her friend were abducted at age 15 while hitchhiking. The man took them to a house, and Miriam escaped but her friend was murdered.

I thought the title was very apropo because of the slow burn of anger, hatred, jealousy and deceit brewing within these characters. Carla remembers her sister Angela, who confessed to being the one who left the study door open so that Ben fell.I may be biased as I was expecting a book as extraordinary as ‘The Girl on the Train’ so therefore I left feeling mildly underwhelmed and wanting a hair more. A young man, Daniel Sutherland, has been found deceased on a houseboat. Leaving the scene of the crime is Laura, a young woman known to police. Fortunately for Daniel, there is a noisy neighbor Miriam who takes detailed records of all of the comings and goings. However, Daniel's mother, Angela, died just a few weeks before Daniel in an accident. Are these deaths connected? Was it Laura? What do we really know? Like the three parts of a braid, the stories of the three women in A Slow Fire Burning come together and are interwoven into one.