A Slow Fire Burning

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A truly satisfying, multi-layered maze of a mystery with a cast of flawed characters so real I'm still thinking of them days after I turned the last page. With characters and a setting similar to HBO’s streaming sensation Mare of Easttown, this story seems tailor-made for the streaming treatment.

Her sister, mother of the deceased Daniel, was also discovered dead (decomposing against a hot radiator with a broken neck a few weeks before Daniel’s murder. This is a well-written book, the words flow nicely, and the title was a great success, depicting the slow fire burning of anger, resentment, jealousy, hatred and deceit. Not quite it: It was true that she'd seen him a couple of times since he'd moored up, and that she'd clocked him right away for an amateur.The killer, for me at least, didn’t come as a huge surprise, but it’s the why that’ll leave readers squirming. The gripping new thriller from the author of The Girl on the Train features a dead body on a London houseboat and a smörgåsbord of possible culprits. Laura, especially; she was left hobbled and damaged and then betrayed over and over by the people who should have been there for her. The twists weren’t as action-packed as I was hoping they would be, but it still made for an enticing story. The characters would be largely unlikeable and frustrating, if they hadn’t been bestowed with such carefully crafted and unspeakably tragic back stories.

A treat: utterly readable, moving in parts and saturated with the kind of localised detail that made The Girl on the Train so compelling . 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. She leaned forward, her forehead resting against the mirror so that she wouldn't have to look herself in the eye, only looking down was worse, because that way she could watch the blood ooze out of her, and it made her woozy, made her feel like she might throw up.Early in the book, one of the women mentions how old books are slowly self-combusting, alluding to the deterioration that occurs inside paper. It looks like a contemporary fiction about crowded and very unlikable characters’ connections with each other!

After getting the full picture and understanding the characters’ back stories and connections, your reading journey gets less bumpy but it’s still struggling and requiring your extra efforts. We begin to learn more about him, his unhappy and caustic relationship with his mother, his aunt Carla and others, but don’t really understand him even at the end.That was what Miriam told Detective Inspector Barker, in any case, when he asked her, later on, What was it made you look? My thanks to Penguin Random House UK Audio, Transworld Digital and NetGalley for providing a copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. Some people come and go regularly; they have a patch, a stretch of the water they like to cover, so you get to know some of them. A good everyday thriller / mystery that didn’t quite hit the mark on this occasion but I do like this author.