A Slow Fire Burning

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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. A Slow Fire Burning twists and turns like a great thriller should, but it's also deep, intelligent and intensely human. Hawkins builds and layers to a point where it’s perfectly feasible that any one of them could have killed in cold blood. When she looked up at him, he was looking around the room, taking in the tiny, neat cabin, the books above the sink (One Pot Cooking, A New Way with Vegetables), the herbs on the sill, the basil and coriander in their plastic tubs, the rosemary going woody in a blue-glazed pot.

She'd had that thought when she first realized who the boy was, but she'd not known how best to take advantage. The detective was nodding again, noting all this down, and Miriam felt sure it wouldn't take him long to figure out exactly who she was talking about.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. He'd been in that mooring sixteen days, two full days longer than he was entitled to be, and she'd intended to have a word with him about moving along, even though it wasn't really her job, not her responsibility, but she-unlike most-was a permanent fixture around here and that imbued her with a particular sense of public-spiritedness. I did get through this quickly due to the short chapters, but it was a disappointing read for me overall. 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.

Not something Laura expected to say or even think, but standing there in her bathroom, shaking uncontrollably, blood pulsing hot and steady from the cut to her arm, she had to admit that imaginary Deidre was bang on the money. I found the last half of the book to be real good as everything unfolded and came together in some shocking revelations.A Slow Fire Burning is another slow burn with a lot of characters but it is so well constructed that it is worth sticking with. A Slow Fire Burning absolutely held me with its compelling, multi-generational cast of women and the brilliantly evoked pathos of damaged lives.

I thought the title was very apropo because of the slow burn of anger, hatred, jealousy and deceit brewing within these characters. We start in this book at the ending and follow through the back stories of all of the characters, switching back and forth also through various timelines.She was in a horrific accident at the age of ten which left her with some brain damage, causing all kinds of unacceptable and out of control incidents to occur. As if someone else wrote it, chapter 30 was my favourite one, where I asked why couldn’t have been like that throughout the book? Each person the spotlight falls on seems to be hiding something and as additional information is progressively fed in I found that my perception of what was going on in the background was subtly (or sometime not so subtly) challenged. But the reason I frame it in this way is that it came and went before I’d realised that that's what it was.

With the same propulsion that captivated millions of readers worldwide in The Girl on the Train and Into the Water , Paula Hawkins unfurls a gripping, twisting story of deceit, murder, and revenge. Miriam knows that just because Laura is witnessed leaving the scene of a horrific murder with blood on her clothes, that doesn't mean she's a killer. I found it ambitious in that each character had reasons to be the murderer, depending upon the chapter. Three women were among the last to see him - Laura, his one night stand, Miriam, his neighbor and Carla, his aunt. 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.I think I might have held on to the counter, just there, on the left-hand side, when you come into the cabin. There are unreliable and unlikeable characters, a book within a book and plenty of twists and turns.