A Slow Fire Burning

Paula Hawkins’s third novel, A Slow Fire Burning, centers on a murder in a narrowboat community on London’s Regent’s Canal. When Daniel Sutherland is found stabbed aboard his houseboat, the investigation pulls in three women whose lives had already brushed against his. Laura Kilbride is a volatile young woman marked by a traumatic brain injury from a childhood car crash, whose tendency toward impulsive violence makes her an immediate suspect. Miriam Lewis is a grieving mother who lives on a neighboring boat, still haunted by the long-ago disappearance and murder of her young daughter, and whose connection to Daniel runs deeper than she admits. Carla Myerson is Daniel’s aunt, a woman hollowed out by the death of her own sister, Angela, in a fall down a staircase—a death tangled up with Daniel and with a manuscript Angela was writing. The novel unfolds through shifting, often unreliable first-person and limited-third narration, so each woman’s account implicates and withholds in different measures. Hawkins builds the plot around misdirection and withheld secrets, revisiting the same events from conflicting angles rather than resolving them neatly. A recurring motif is the theme of rage that simmers quietly before it finally flares—an idea the title carries. By pairing the canal murders with the long shadow of a earlier death and the unreliability of memory and self-justification, Hawkins examines grief, guilt, and the ways trauma can distort a person’s sense of what she owes the dead. The mystery’s resolution turns on whose narrative has been most carefully curated.