A Slow Fire Burning: The addictive new Sunday Times No.1 bestseller from the author of The Girl on the Train

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The various characters and their backstories were interesting, but the reason for the crime still escapes me: I really had to suspend my disbelief to accept the summing up. We can all agree that the main question is who killed Daniel, the 23-year-old on the houseboat, but it is soon revealed that his estranged mother had died just a few weeks earlier—a drunk who probably fell, but maybe was pushed, down the stairs—and his cousin also fell to his death some years back. The car was driven by the man with whom Laura’s mother was having an affair, and her mother’s complicity in trying to protect him left Laura bitter and partially estranged from her family.

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. The twists weren’t as action-packed as I was hoping they would be, but it still made for an enticing story.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. 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. This was my third Paula Hawkins book and while I found it somewhat slow going, the writing was superb. Sorry but I have to admit this is not one of my favorite works of the author and not one of my favorite reads of this year! Moving back and forth in time, the characters’ backstories are slowly revealed as Hawkins turns you every which way but loose.

As an adolescent, Laura suffered severe injuries, including a traumatic brain injury, when she was hit by a car; her injuries also resulted in physical disabilities. In terms of non-fiction, I loved Real Estate by Deborah Levy and The Devil You Know by Gwen Adshead and Eileen Horne. When Theo sees the notebook revealing Daniel’s potential role in Ben’s death, and knowing that Carla has already seen it, he goes to the police and confesses to having killed Daniel. Lest we think Miriam is an upright citizen, we’re also told that she nicked a key ring “still sticky with blood” next to Daniel’s body and withheld it from the police. And she was the central character in If It Bleeds, a novella in the 2020 collection of the same name.I didn't plan on reading another Paula Hawkins, but Rosamund Pike narrates and I thought just maybe. She discovered the body after all, has long-standing beef with Daniel’s family and stole a key piece of evidence from the crime scene.

She had to lift the (always surprisingly, unpleasantly heavy) cassette out of the little toilet at the back of the boat, carry it through the cabin and out onto the towpath, and from there .

Theo claims to have killed his nephew out of jealousy and anger after learning that Daniel and Carla had a sexual relationship.

Carla had a tense and difficult relationship with both her sister and nephew because 15 years earlier, Carla and Theo’s young son, Ben, died after being left with Angela for the weekend. Claire Messud sparked the “likability” debate in 2013 when she gave an interview to Publishers Weekly about her then new novel, “The Woman Upstairs. Miriam has never been able to get anyone to believe her claims and has always hated Theo for what he did to her. Published in over fifty languages, it has been a Number 1 bestseller around the world and was a box office hit film starring Emily Blunt.The characters would be largely unlikeable and frustrating, if they hadn’t been bestowed with such carefully crafted and unspeakably tragic back stories. Gerry, who is pointedly reminiscent of Philip Roth’s Zuckerman, thinks back over his relationships with the women in his life. Opening with the discovery of a man’s body on a canal boat in London, Hawkins goes on to show how past trauma and heartbreak are woven deep into the lives of her three main characters: lonely Miriam, who lives on the canal boat next door, whose brutal experience as a teenager still casts a shadow over her life; Laura, a troubled young woman who was seen leaving the boat with blood on her clothes; and Carla, the murdered man’s aunt, whose life was derailed more than a decade earlier. The highlight of these goings-on is Laura, a tiny but ferocious young woman who was seen running from Daniel's boat with blood on her mouth and clothes the last night he was alive. One woman in her 20s suffered a brutal hit-and-run as a child that resulted in brain damage causing behavioural issues.