Name: Cheri McElroy's review of A Slow Fire Burning by Paula Hawkins
Item: A Slow Fire Burning
Rating: 5
Author: Cheri McElroy

Paula Hawkins

THE SCORCHING NEW THRILLER FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN 'What is wrong with you?' Laura has spent most of her life being judged. She's seen as hot-tempered, troubled, a loner. Some even call her dangerous. 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. Bitter experience has taught her how easy it is to get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Carla is reeling from the brutal murder of her nephew. She trusts no one: good people are capable of terrible deeds. But how far will she go to find peace? Innocent or guilty, everyone is damaged. Some are damaged enough to kill. Look what you started.

The Scorching New Thriller from the Author of the Girl on the Train

A Slow Fire Burning

Alexandra Menze

Look what you started. When a young man is found gruesomely murdered in a London houseboat, it triggers questions about three women in particular. Laura is the troubled one-night stand last seen in the victim's home. Carla is the grief-stricken aunt, already mourning another family member who died only weeks earlier. And Miriam is the nosy neighbor who found the bloodied body but is keeping secrets from the police. Three women, mostly unknown to one another, with separate connections to the victim. Three women who are--for different reasons--simmering with resentment. Who are, whether they know it or not, burning to right the wrongs done to them. When it comes to revenge, even good people might be capable of terrible deeds. How far might any one of them go to find peace? How long can secrets smolder before they explode into flame?

The plot revolves around the death of a young man, Daniel, who is found with his throat slit on a houseboat. But the deeper story is about pain, trauma, grief, and how each character deals with or doesn't deal with the past. This was a well-done novel.

Cheri McElroy

a relatively easy and short read coming up at 361 pages. thrillers have me hooked so i always fly through them. saw the plot twists coming, and i did like how laura was just a little all over the place.

the parts that did NOT work were theo’s character and the convenience of certain plotlines - moreover jeremy suddenly being alive lmao miss me with that shit 

yasmini

a relatively easy and short read coming up at 361 pages. thrillers have me hooked so i always fly through them. saw the plot twists coming, and i did like how laura was just a little all over the place.

the parts that did NOT work were theo’s character and the convenience of certain plotlines - moreover jeremy suddenly being alive lmao miss me with that shit 

Jessica De Hoyos

Rachel Kanyid

This is the first thriller/mystery I have LOVED in a long while. I truly enjoyed all of the characters and all the little misdirections thrown in there!

Kristen Claiborn

I am sad to say I was disappointed with this book. I LOVED The Girl on the Train and really enjoyed Into The Water, but this one fell short of her previous work. The alternating points of view are starting to become tedious and not enjoyable for me, it seems like half the "best" books of 2021 have fallen into this writing style and I'm finding it tiresome. I also have discovered I like linear story lines, so the jumpy, back-and-forth, trend is also less enjoyable for me. This book started at the end, which seems counter-intuitive, but I'm not the bestselling author, I'm just a poor sap who likes to read.

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️💫

“Innocent or guilty, everyone is damaged. Some are damaged enough to kill.”

Meet a cast of characters that are damaged and unlikeable. Then expose a few past secrets and something is apt to burn. 

I enjoyed this slow-burn, character-driven whodunnit. The story is worth it just to meet Irene who, at 80, was the star of the nov in my eyes. I definitely recommend this one.

Thank you to #NetGalley for the ARC.

James Eaton

Enjoyable book. If you liked "The Girl on The Train" or similar novels, then you will like this book. 

Nice twists and turns as the story unfolds. If you need a beach read or weekend read, this might be a good option.

Laura has spent most of her life being judged. She's seen as hot-tempered, troubled, a loner. Some even call her dangerous. 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. Innocent or guilty, everyone is damaged. Some are damaged enough to kill.

Kelsey Novak

Overall a decent read. However I felt like it was a very predictable ending. Also I felt like Miriam’s story and Theo’s book were pretty irrelevant. But I guess it kept it interesting.

Allie Adkins

Full Review: https://oftenofftopic.wordpress.com/2...
As much as I like to try and broaden my horizons when it comes to the genres of books I read, sometimes I just have to go back to my comfort zone to the mystery/thrillers that I love so much. I really enjoyed The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins so her new release for 2021, A Slow Fire Burning was automatically on my radar to read.

In A Slow Fire Burning, the body of a young man is found on a canal boat by a nosy neighbour. There are three main suspects, and the book takes us through the events both leading up to the murder, and the event immediately after. What I loved most about The Girl on the Train was Paula Hawkins' talent for describing the British setting, and that was definitely the strongest element of this book, too. I live just a couple of roads away from a canal with multiple canal boats often moored there and it was so easy to picture this story happening right where I live.

Unfortunately, the setting was the only thing I really loved about this book. My biggest struggle with starting a new read is getting to know the characters. I probably read the first 10-20% of a book at about half the speed that I read the rest, because I'm trying to remember the characters' names and where exactly they fit in to the story. Once I'm there, I'm absolutely fine, but I struggled with at least the entire first half of A Slow Fire Burning. Maybe that's on me, but there aren't even that many characters here and every night when I picked up my kindle I was finding myself having to skip back several pages to try and jog my memory of what happened last. Eventually I gave up and went with the flow, and that helped in the end.

By the time I found myself well acquainted with everyone involved in this murder mystery, I'd lost the interest of finding out who did it and why. The second half was much faster paced and more thrilling, but by that point it was all a case of too little, too late for me. I also found a lot of the characters really unlikeable. The guy who got murdered wasn't a nice guy. The three suspects also weren't very nice people, so what are the stakes here? The only character I liked, and actually I really loved her, was the elderly neighbour who had more sense and charisma than everyone else put together.

So I guess this is my first read of the year that I really didn't like! Which is rare for me, I tend to enjoy almost everything that I read. But you can't win them all, can you? I'm still looking forward to Paula Hawkins' upcoming novel Blind Spot, due for release in 2022. It hasn't put me off at all.

Abi Hills

Unlike the cover and title suggest, this book doesn't have an awful lot to do with fire. It's more an extended metaphor, evident in the pace and themes in the book. This is written by the author of "The girl on the train", and like that novel made me read it fast like riding a train, this was slow, like a burning flame that started off small but picked up the pace and became truly heated nearer the end of the book. 

I'm not sure if it's better than "The girl on the train", I may need to read it again. However, I did enjoy it, and for now, it's probably on the same level.

Melanie Richards

Skye Sherman

** spoiler alert **
           Wow—best book I’ve read in a while!! I didn’t feel like this was a slow burn at all… another title might’ve better captured the vibe. This story felt more like a web, and it was amazing how Hawkins interconnects and weaves together the stories of all the different characters in fascinating, unexpected ways. That was the best part… figuring out how all the stories overlapped and played into each other. 

However, I was left with several unanswered questions, like: What was the true nature of Carla and Daniel’s relationship? Was it inappropriate or was it just Daniel? Also, I was really thinking Hawkins would weave Jeremy back in somehow. Like maybe he was Daniel’s long-lost father, which would explain why he was the way he was?! I was thinking the characters would reveal some past connections more than they did. 

Still, overall a great thriller that I ripped though because I couldn’t stop thinking about it and wondering what would happen next!

Katie Avila

It was a little tough to get into and even harder to stay in… There was no real climax here, just a steady rumblings of turns that were pretty expected. I feel like loose ends were pretty hastily tied in the last 25 pages.

Jill Niemeier 

Sabetha Danes

I wasn't going to read this, because I was really disappointed with Into the Water but I read a few reviews that sounded like with this book she went back to the style I loved from The Girl on the Train.

The plot is very twisty, and 6 degrees of separation style like The Girl on the Train. I enjoyed that it showed the events from the entire casts perspective. No real main character in the book. Just a bunch of lives and how they intertwine with each other. 

This book is very tragic, it has a somber ending and dives deep into family troubles. If you're looking for warnings, there's abduction, child death, adultery, murder, attacks, and animal murder.

The mystery aspects were kind of duh so the final reveal wasn't really that dazzling. Not that it made it a bad read, I just expected more I guess. Overall it's an emotional read, that connects a lot of dots along the way. 

The narrator of the audiobook was A+, added a great level of emotion to each characters voice.

If you like books that have a few different puzzles happening all at once, you'll love this one.

nuha ✨️

This book, oh boy, gave me whiplash.

The thing about this book is how addicting this is. This book to me was like alcohol to Angela. I had to pause my studying (and my life basically) for this book. And I am not extremely happy about how it turned out. 

I have to say, Paula Hawkins does have a way with words. This was my first book by Paula Hawkins (yes, I didn't read the girl on the train, but in my defence, I know how the plot goes), and I am sort of on the fence about it. I liked her writing style, I liked the relatively short chapters, I liked the pace of the book. But what I didn't like were the horrible, HORRIBLE characters, the absolute shitshow that was the investigation, and the mediocre plot?

I had my doubts about what happened and the culprit from the very beginning. It was kinda obvious. It wasn't bad, but it was pretty average and it definitely wasn't amazing - something that I expected from someone like Paula Hawkins. 
The investigation, oh my god, what was that? I have so many questions. Why wasn't Miriam investigated in regards to Jeremy's murder? Why were the lawyers that Laura got *so* bad? Why weren't they telling laura to shut up, or even telling the police that what they had was circumstantial evidence? Is this how investigations work in real life, if so, then I am disappointed. 

The characters, oh my god. All of them were "sad". Paula really went ahead and used the word so many times that I swear if I see that word again I am going to puke. She describe the detective's smile as sad, she described the carpet as sad, she described the day as sad, she described the book as sad, and she certainly described someone's face as sad. It was just way too much, but I guess at one point she realized what she was doing and changed sad to miserably, or something along those lines. 

I am not even going to get started on the characters. They were all either horrible or stupid. they had zero redeemable qualities. I guess Irene and Miriam were okay, but others, nope. Horrible, horrible characters. 

Like others mentioned, the number of POVs was a bit overwhelming. On top of that, the author thought - for some reason, it was okay to include excerpts from the fictional book which is a major plot point. And that just made everything so much more confusing. 

It wasn't all negatives though, I did enjoy the book in a way. And that's why I gave it 3 stars.

Tori Nelson

This was a really fun suspense/thriller read! While there are a lot of characters, I found all of them pretty easy to distinguish. I liked the multiple POVs between the chapters, and excerpts of a book within this book. I've read Hawkins' other works, but this one is by far my favorite! 

A well-written story, developed and complex characters, with an ending I didn't see coming, but kept me guessing.

Caitlyn Whitt

I only give this book a 3/5 because it’s not my most favorite genre - but I’m trying to step out of my comfort zone. Someone who likes this style may give it a 4/5. 

It’s a crime, mystery, “who’s the killer” type book where you are strung a large web of interconnected characters and try to figure out who-done-it. I will say I changed my mind a time or two about who the guilty party was, but was not at all surprised by the ending. The real meat of this book is when you are a little over half way through and you are truly deep into the characters and feel for them. I felt like I understood their flaws more and more with each passing chapter, and felt forgiveness for mistakes they had made.

Like I said - not my go-to genre, and I wasn’t dying to keep reading it, however once I would pick it up I found myself unable to stop. The mystery isn’t what dragged me in, but understanding the demons within each character kept me hooked.

Years ago someone lit a match... Laura has spent most of her life being judged. She's seen as hot-tempered, troubled, a loner. Some even call her dangerous. Miriam knows that just because Laura is witnessed leaving the scene of a horrific murder with blood on her clothes doesn't mean Laura is a killer. Bitter experience has taught her how easy it is to get caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Carla is reeling from the brutal murder of her nephew. She trusts no one and no thing: good people are capable of terrible deeds. But how far will she go to find peace? Innocent or guilty, everyone is carrying damage. Some are damaged enough to kill. Look what you started.

Susan Forsythe

2 1/2⭐️ There were too many characters to keep track of and unnecessary side stories that did nothing for the story/book. Otherwise an alright read.

Madeleine Ngo

Jackelyn

This book left me feeling quite conflicted. While the story itself is very good and gets you hooked, Hawkins writing style detracts a bit from the story. The writing style is the same as her other stories with each chapter jumping from character to character and even to different timeliness at times. I found her writing style led to some confusion and lack of connectivity in the story. If you read "The girl on the train" and enjoyed it you will likely enjoy this book. 

CONTENT WARNINGS: Murder, physical trauma, family trauma, suicidal ideation, alcoholism.

Lauren Attaway

Slow Fire Burning is a tricky book for me to view, because I don’t want to give that much away, but also it took me awhile to really dig into the story, in spite of a murder right up front. Between the POV shifts, the references to a novel within a novel, there was a lot going on. Still, one it got about fifty or so pages in, I could not wait to finish it, and desperately had to read on to find out what happened. A slow burn indeed.

Cristina Quiñones Castellanos

Full review: https://thereadermoon.wordpress.com/2...

Liesa Hausen

While reading, I kept thinking that Hawkins' characters get more twisted with every book she writes (don't know if I would still say that). Actually, there are a lot of things I don't know; this is a book I'm going to have to reread at least once to truly grasp the plot, the characters, the style. 
Although the reveal of the murderer did not surprise me, I sat open-mouthed quite a few times - Hawkins has a way of portraying the human mind; the dark corners, the abysses, but also the light, the good.
Her style is amazing, as always. Writing about a book that jumps between perspectives and in the timeline while having the characters in the story complain a book that does the exact same thing? Genius.

Alexandra Menze &
A Slow Fire Burning by Paula Hawkins

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