The author of The Girl on the Train returns with a new novel about the mysterious lives of three women whose connections to a young man found gruesomely murdered on a London houseboat begin to raise questions.
Paula Hawkins' third novel gets off to an intriguing start ... As the mystery deepens...Hawkins' elaborate guessing game becomes even more fiendish ... We examine each profile, sift the scattered details—a bad mother, a missing dog, a series of graphic sketches—and follow the twists and turns to a denouement spring-loaded with one or two final surprises ... A Slow Fire Burning lacks the suspense of [Hawkins'] debut but it still manages to be a gripping page-turner. The source of its narrative force is its compellingly unpredictable characters.
... this novel is a whole new level of psychological terror. Deliciously dark and dangerously unsettlingly, A Slow Fire Burning will give you chills with every chapter ... A chilling story that'll leave you with more questions than answers, A Slow Fire Burning gives the term 'thriller' a whole new meaning. With unexpected characters, unforeseen consequences, and unusual connections, Hawkins's new book is a bloody masterpiece that's darker than it appears.
Not only is every character in Hawkins’s novel vile, self-serving, and narcissistic, even worse, they’re dull. Dull, dull, dull. Even the serial killer is dull ... Hawkins relies on a zigzag storytelling style where we readers hear multiple perspectives on the same events courtesy of a third-person narrator who has access to the thoughts of different characters .... Hawkins’s novel, in contrast, offers little incentive for a reader to stay involved. Her bland rogues gallery of characters—major and minor—attests, once again, to 'the banality of evil.' And, with the exception of a clever plot twist at the very end of this novel, its revelations don’t merit its ornate complications. The 'fire' that’s burning in Hawkins’s title isn’t the only thing about her latest novel that’s slow.
