This Is What Happened [Paperback]

From CWA Gold & Steel Dagger winner Mick Herron comes a shocking, twisted novel of thrilling suspense about one woman’s attempt to be better than ordinary.
 
Twenty-six-year-old Maggie Barnes is someone you would never look at twice. Living alone in a month-to-month sublet in the huge city of London, with no family but an estranged sister, no boyfriend or partner, and not much in the way of friends, Maggie is just the kind of person who could vanish from the face of the earth without anyone taking notice. Or just the kind of person MI5 needs to infiltrate the establishment and thwart an international plot that puts all of Britain at risk.

Now one young woman has the chance to be a hero—if she can think quickly enough to stay alive.Praise forThis Is What Happened

Sucks you in from the opening page . . . what looks at first like your basic spy thriller morphs into something far different—a tricky game of three-character monte filled with sly twists that Herron reveals with the precision of a high-end Swiss watchmaker.
—John Powers, NPR'sFresh Air

Mr. Herron cleverly employs the tropes of spy fiction to construct a frightening psychological puzzle. He then transforms the conundrum into yet another unexpected story, one that leaves the reader hoping for a resolution that may or may not materialize.
—Tom Nolan,The Wall Street Journal

There is, quite simply, no current thriller writer who enjoys better word-of-mouth than Mick Herron.
—Financial Times

Like [Herron's] other books, this one resides where escapism and political paranoia meet. Planted firmly in the realm of the possible, his works toy with 21st-century fears and manias: terrorism, government deceit, economic meltdowns and hostage-takers . . . That he accomplishes all this while interspersing the hair-raising with the humorous is quite al3œ