A Slow Fire Burning
A Novel
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3.7 • 99 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The stabbing murder of 23-year-old Daniel Sutherland on his houseboat in London's Regent's Canal drives this twist-laden if unremarkable page-turner from bestseller Hawkins (The Girl on the Train). Miriam Lewis, who lives in the neighboring vessel, finds the body and removes a bloody key from the scene before notifying the police. Decades earlier, Miriam survived a horrific attack, wrote an unpublished memoir about it, and shared the manuscript with Theo Myerson, who used it, without attribution, as the basis for a novel, The One Who Got Away. Theo, it turns out, is Daniel's uncle by marriage, and his toddler son died from a fall at Daniel's mother's home. Another suspect is Laura Kilbride, who slept with Daniel on the night of his death; as a child, she suffered a skull fracture that affected her ability to self-regulate and has trouble functioning as an adult. Sections from The One Who Got Away and flashbacks add to the challenge of putting the puzzle pieces together. The result is a satisfying whodunit, but its overreliance on coincidence makes it fall short of the high standard of Hawkins's previous work.
