I really enjoyed this author’s first book, but was not a huge fan of her second. What did I think of this one? Check out my review of A Slow Fire Burning by Paula Hawkins.
Jen’s Quick Take: A Slow Fire Burning
- A slow paced mystery told in reverse
- Includes epistolary elements and an accusation that a writer stole a plot
- Has a very different feel than The Girl on the Train
- Published on August 31, 2021 by Riverhead Books.
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Review of A Slow Fire Burning
I was a big fan of The Girl on the Train, both the book and the movie. Hawkins’s second book wasn’t for me, but I still thought I’d try A Slow Fire Burning and see what I thought.
The title is appropriate: this book is fairly slow paced.
A Slow Fire Burning is not a suspenseful thriller, but more of a backwards mystery story. A young man is discovered dead on his houseboat and the book goes into his life, his family’s backstory, and the lives and pasts of his neighbors in order to explain who might have killed him and why, and who actually committed the murder.
There have been a LOT of books lately with a fire motif, starting with Little Fires Everywhere (2017) and continuing into the present. We’ve had Things You Save in a Fire, (2019) The Husbands (2021), Malibu Rising (2021) and a few others that I’ll add if I think of them.
The format of A Slow Fire Burning is interesting, but one that might not work for every reader. The book starts with Daniel’s murder, then jumps back and forth in time.
The narrative also incorporates snippets of a book written by one of the characters based on a real life experience that another character had as a teenager. (This is another trope I’m seeing a LOT in 2020 and 2021 thrillers: a writer stealing (or accused of stealing) another character’s story. We’ve seen it in The Plot, in Dream Girl, and a bit in Rock Paper Scissors, to name a few. Here’s a whole post about writers as main chararacers in a mystery.
I’ve been reading a lot of thrillers lately and it was nice to read a book with a lot more psychological depth. I enjoyed getting all the backstory of the characters, learning about their pasts and the events and disputes and grudges that contributed to their present lives. They all had a lot of drama in their lives and all of them were connected in some way to the others.
Have you read this? Come over to my spoilers post for A Slow Fire Burning and let’s discuss it all!
This troupe as you say. They are all writing at around the same time so is it in the air with a writing stealing someone else’s work? (The Plot did also insert the other book in it, which I kind of liked better than the original story.) But now I don’t want to read another book with this kind of subplot or plot. Also, it makes writers, like myself, a little nervous now to share in critique groups. BTW, I also am tired of someone discovering a person’s journal.
I think sometimes things are in the air, especially since these were all published at the same time. Most of them also have a feminist bent, where it’s the “woman behind the man” sort of thing. I was reading an article about a very famous male author that claimed that his wife had some of the ideas behind his books, an allegation which came out in their divorce.