A Slow Fire Burning

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With characters and a setting similar to HBO’s streaming sensation Mare of Easttown, this story seems tailor-made for the streaming treatment. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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. One woman in her 20s suffered a brutal hit-and-run as a child that resulted in brain damage causing behavioural issues. An unflinching look at the damage sparked by grief, loss and betrayal - and the revenge and retribution that ensues.

We have the nosy neighbour who had found the body, a young woman who’d had a recent one night stand on the victim's boat and an aunt who seems to be nursing a whole bag of resentment, for reasons we are to discover later. She is talking to detectives about discovering the “beautiful dead face” of Daniel Sutherland, “his fingertips curled to the floor. There are unreliable and unlikeable characters, a book within a book and plenty of twists and turns.

I found that I ended up putting the book down for a while whereas her others I didn't want to put down. 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. The detective was sitting opposite her, his knees almost touching her own, his shoulders hunched and back rounded. The first time she saw him, she'd said good morning and he'd looked up at her and smiled and all the hair stood up on the back of her neck. Like the three parts of a braid, the stories of the three women in A Slow Fire Burning come together and are interwoven into one.

Angela’s neighbor, a senior citizen named Irene, found her; likewise, the marina’s resident busybody, Mariam, found Daniel. It took a while to lace all the plot threads together and I enjoyed the second half more than the first, but overall I was gripped.You will need to think, untangle story lines and understand this myriad cast of characters and convoluted but ultimately brilliantly written novel. The lives of the women was the interesting part of the story but again it didn’t offer anything particularly new and exciting. Hawkins uses a little humor when describing the writing style that made Theo’s book such a success, mirroring her own style, one so successfully used in The Girl on the Train. She ran the tips of her wrinkled fingers back and forth over her beautiful, bone-white scars: hip, thigh, shoulder, back of skull. There are numerous characters seen leaving the crime scene reportedly by his nosey neighbor Miriam, who has a side story of her own tying the Twist and turns and complicating who did it.

But her newest thriller, A Slow Fire Burning, may be the one that haunts readers long after they’ve finished it. Regardless, we only recommend products or services we use personally and believe will add value to our readers.A Slow Fire Burning, as the title implies, takes its time with the storytelling, concentrating instead on character back story and motivation. This article comes from Saturday, the new print magazine from the Guardian which combines the best features, culture, lifestyle and travel writing in one beautiful package.