A SLOW FIRE BURNING (2021)
By Paula Hawkins
Riverhead Books, 307 pages.
★★★★ ½
Several bodies, a passel of damaged people, houseboats on a canal, and a gifted writer spinning a yarn. What could better? Not much. There’s a reason why so many novices want their works to be compared to those of Paula Hawkins. A Slow Fire Burning takes us to South London. Most visitors seldom stray beyond its usual tourist sites such as the London Eye, the Tate Modern, and Tower Bridge as much of the rest is residential and some are among the most crime-ridden of London’s fringes.
The one described by Hawkins surely is. The story pivots around several people who either live on canal boats or spend a lot of time there and in nearby neighborhoods. It is loaded with people associated Daniel Sutherland, a murder victim. Is it a coincidence that Daniel’s mother died just a few weeks before him? Are several other deaths from less than natural causes?
Miriam Lewis finds Daniel’s body and swings into action of trying to sleuth out his killer. She is not, however, any sort of Sherlock Holmes. Miriam was traumatized in her teens when she and a friend did something fatally stupid. Miriam is now an overweight busybody who is so friendless that she has few social interactions other than occasional customer who enters the adjacent floating bookstore where she works part-time. That’s fine by her, as she’s even more fixated on a book she wrote titled The One Who Got Away. Based on a tip, Miriam thinks that Theo Myerson stole her ideas. Insofar as detectives are concerned, there’s a lot about Miriam that makes her a suspect.
Theo certainly has demons to battle. He is a divorcee whose son Ben died before he was four. He blames Ben’s Aunt Angela, Daniel’s mother, for his son’s death. One witness recalls that Theo made Angela cry, which was the second-to-last time she was seen. Maybe Theo killed both of them. Then again, Theo’s ex-wife Carla is also wiggy, might have been sleeping with Daniel, and has her own theories about why Ben died.
Other dodgy people float through the plot. There is Laura, who Miriam thinks had sex with Daniel. Laura is unstable, hears voices, despises her mother-in-law, and has a limp courtesy of being hit while cycling by the man who became her deceased mother’s second husband. She’s such a psychological mess that her mantra is “it’s not my fault” to all situations, even when it is indeed her bad. Plus, she found Angela’s body and has Daniel’s watch. This makes her a person of interest, though she insists Miriam offed Daniel. Is it happenstance that Laura helps 80-year-old Irene, a widow who also happens to have been Angela’s friend?
If murder is, as so often reported, the product of damaged minds, who do you want to finger? Things become even messier when there are confessions that the police doubt and arrests that don’t stick. Hawkins thickens her plot even more via the use of a book-within-a-book technique and you can probably guess the identity of the other book. The mystery centers on clues from that book, plus a missing dog, the dog’s leash, a door key, a St. Christopher medal, a man in a wheelchair, and the assumption that all old people are just in a holding pattern waiting to die and know nothing about technology. There are also attempts at framing both innocent and guilty people, plus numerous other incorrect assumptions and one that turns out to be true with a twist added.
As you can infer from the above complex web, A Slow Fire Burning is an intricate story that places attention demands upon the reader. There is no Mis Marple or Hercule Poirot to explain the clues; you need to do the mental work yourself. It’s that rare work that’s a page-turning murder mystery that is more than just mindless escape. If anything, the book might be more complicated than it needed to be, but kudos to Hawkins for not resorting to any sort of happy ever after ending. Even after murders are resolved there are still folks in serious need of therapy. Just like real life.
Rob Weir
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