A Slow Fire Burning

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After getting the full picture and understanding the characters’ back stories and connections, your reading journey gets less bumpy but it’s still struggling and requiring your extra efforts. So this, added to the complicated way in which the story is told, had the effect of distracting me to the point I’d put the book down and not pick it up again for some time.

I found it a little confusing, in truth, though I confess I am easily lost if too much information is put on the table. When a young man is found gruesomely murdered in a London houseboat, it triggers questions about three women who knew him. Like the three parts of a braid, the stories of the three women in A Slow Fire Burning come together and are interwoven into one.Here are characters you want to spend time with, living in a world you believe in, and caught up in a plot that holds you in its grip.

There are several possibilities, all with slightly plausible reasons why they may have wanted Daniel gone. An unflinching look at the damage sparked by grief, loss and betrayal - and the revenge and retribution that ensues. We have the nosy neighbour who had found the body, a young woman who’d had a recent one night stand on the victim's boat and an aunt who seems to be nursing a whole bag of resentment, for reasons we are to discover later.

Then there is Angela's sister Carla and her ex-husband Theo who have parted ways after another alleged accidental death of their three-year-old son fifteen years back, left in the care of Angela and Daniel.