The following version of this book was used to create this study guide: Hawkins, Paula. A Slow Fire Burning. Penguin Random House, 2021. Kindle.

The novel is narrated by an omniscient narrator in the third-person past. The narrator spends each chapter in a different character’s perspective. The chapters alternate between Irene, Laura, Carla, Theo, and Miriam. Many chapters end with short excerpts from Theo’s fictional crime novel, The One Who Got Away, whose concept was stolen from Miriam’s memoir about her abduction as a teenager.

Laura, a young woman who suffered a traumatic brain injury when she was ten, is the prime suspect in the murder of Daniel, a young man who is found dead on his houseboat. Laura’s mother had been having an affair with a man who left their house and hit Laura on his drive home. Her mother had run out to the accident and urged the man to run away so that she would not get caught cheating. Laura spent three months in a coma and then underwent a series of painful surgeries to rehabilitate her body, which never fully recovered. When she got out of the hospital, her mother left her father and Laura felt abandoned and angry. As an adult, Laura worked at a laundromat and had extreme emotional and mental problems, including poor impulse control. The night before Daniel died, she met him at a bar and slept with him. In the morning, he called her a gimp and they got into a physical fight that ended with her biting him. He left the boat and she went home, stealing his watch, but then someone else murdered him. Because of her involvement with him, Laura became the prime suspect in the detective’s case.

Miriam, an elderly spinster, lived next door to Daniel on a different houseboat. She noticed Daniel’s aunt, Carla, at Daniel’s house a few days prior to his murder. Then, she noticed Laura at his house the night of his murder. On Sunday morning, she realized his door had been open all day Saturday. She went into his home and found his body. She also found Laura’s key, which she recognized from the laundromat. She decided to use her power as the first one on the scene to protect Laura, who she felt bad for, and to frame Carla, since she hated Theo for stealing her memoir.

Theo and Carla suffered a terrible tragedy early on in their marriage. They left their young son, Ben, with Carla’s sister, Angela, and Angela’s son, Daniel. While Angela was in bed, Ben crawled out onto the balcony and fell to his death. Daniel said he witnessed the whole incident and was traumatized. Carla and Theo became extremely angry and depressed. They blamed one another and Angela. Theo cut Angela out of his life entirely, but Carla insisted on sneaking over to Angela’s house all the time to see her sister, despite how much she hated her for letting Ben die. Carla felt very bad for Daniel, who Angela neglected and treated cruelly after the incident. Theo had dealt with his grief by writing his third novel. He stole the idea from a memoir Miriam had written, and then he lied about it. He had recently been getting anonymous letters from a man who kept accusing him of stealing his story, and Theo assumed the letters were from Miriam.

Irene had lived next door to Angela for years, and the two women had been best friends until, almost two months ago, Angela had fallen from the top of her stairs while drunk and passed away. Irene had found the body, along with Laura, who happened to be walking by. Irene hired Laura to pick up groceries for her, since Angela had done that for her. Irene had seen Theo at Angela’s house a few weeks before her body was found, so Irene suspected that Theo had something to do with her death. However, when she told the police about her suspicions, they did not listen to her.

The police interrogated Laura, but then let her go because they did not have enough evidence to charge her. While visiting Irene, Laura noticed that Carla had left her purse in the hall of Angela’s house while she was clearing out Angela’s things. On impulse, Laura stole the purse and then took it to her home. The police searched Laura’s house and discovered a bloody knife and a shirt covered in Daniel’s blood.

The police arrested Laura. Carla gave Irene Angela’s old books. Angela found an erotic picture that Daniel had drawn of Carla hidden in one of the books. She began to suspect that the relationship between Carla and Daniel was erotic, so she went into Angela’s house and found one of Daniel’s notebooks, which contained a graphic novel he had authored called The Origins of Ares. In the story, he had pushed Ben off the balcony. Irene took the notebook with her to show Carla, because she thought that Theo had seen it and killed Daniel, but she ran into Theo instead. He took the notebook from her and looked at it. He was completely shocked. He threw it into the fire and called Irene a cab.

The police discovered that the bloody knife belonged to Theo, so they brought him into the station for questioning. He realized that Carla had killed Daniel after seeing the notebook, so Theo falsely admitted to the murder. The police arrested him, despite their reservations. But Irene knew that Carla was the killer because she had seen Theo’s shock. So, Irene used the voice recorder ap on her phone that Laura had shown her how to use and went to see Carla, who admitted the truth of her crime. Irene brought the recording to the police and Carla was arrested. Miriam and Theo met to clear the air between them and realized that the person who had been writing Theo letters accusing him of stealing the story was in fact that man that had abducted Miriam. They devised a plan to lure him into a meeting and then they killed him and left him on an abandoned houseboat. Laura got out of jail and moved in with Irene, and the two planned to travel the world together.