Review | The Girl on the Train author Paula Hawkins’ new novel, A Slow Fire Burning, is a whodunit on an Agatha Christie scale
- Paula Hawkins’ third novel reduces the part of London in which it is set to a village, one populated by damaged characters who bear grudges and hidden burdens
- These are revealed when two deaths rock the community and police are called in. There is no genius detective here, however – so who’ll solve the crimes?
A Slow Fire Burning by Paula Hawkins pub. Riverhead Books
A Slow Fire Burning is the latest page-turner from Paula Hawkins, the Zimbabwean-born author of the immensely successful The Girl on the Train (2015).
Towards the front of Hawkins’ third novel is a map of a part of inner London identifying the homes of seven characters. Five of them have committed various thefts: money, keys, jewellery, notebooks and life stories, and the other two – mother and estranged son – have died just weeks apart.
Here they are in approximate order of appearance: Irene, a self-described “cliché of old age”; damaged, uninhibited Laura (wrong in the head and body); handsome, troubled, murdered Daniel; damaged, ugly Miriam (she sees a potential alliance with Laura); bereft Carla, stranded between grief and connection; drunken, failed, dead Angela; and plagiarist has-been author Theo.
All live or lived within a short walk of each other (and each chapter switches to a different character’s perspective). In Hawkins’ hands, this bit of London is depicted not as part of the great metropolis but as a village centred on Regent’s Canal, an Agatha Christie scale of setting where all suspects interact and overlap.