Title: A Slow Fire Burning
Author: Paula Hawkins
Type: Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 384
Rating: 3.5/5
This is my second book by Paula Hawkins, because back in the day I read The Girl on the Train like everyone else on the planet. I wasn’t particularly taken with it, but that’s only because it felt a little derivative of all of the other thrillers that were coming out at the time.
This one is different, although it still follows all of the tropes that you’d expect from a thriller novel. And that’s just okay, because it does a good job of tapping into them to tell a decent story that will have you desperate to keep on reading.
Hawkins is a decent writer, and what she does well here is to create a bunch of believable characters and to experiment with the ways in which they interact with one another to tell a compelling tale of mystery and intrigue. It has elements of a classic whodunnit, as well as those touches of crime and thriller for us to enjoy.
I also liked that some of the action takes place on the water in canal boats, because I’ve always found them to be a fascinating lifestyle choice. I actually watch a half dozen narrowboaters on YouTube, and I’ve occasionally daydreamed about moving onto a narrowboat myself.
Then we have the fact that one of the characters is a writer, and that there are a bunch of literary references throughout the book. My edition even included some notes from Hawkins on a few of the books that she talked about.
When I read books like this, I tend not to think too much about who might have committed the crime, and that leaves me in a nice position where I can just enjoy the journey instead of having to worry too much about what’s going on.
That made for a cracking little read that definitely wasn’t a slow fire, although neither did it go up in such a blaze that it burned itself out. The pacing was great, the characterisation was top notch, and the mystery at its heart was plenty of fun, too. I’m not sure what more you could ask for from a thriller novel. Happy reading!
