This Is What Happened
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3.5 • 19 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of Slow Horses comes a riveting novel of psychological 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 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
At the start of this beautifully written and ingeniously plotted standalone from Herron (Nobody Walks), 26-year-old mail room employee Maggie Barnes is trying hard not to get caught late one night in her 27-story London office building. Harvey Wells, an MI5 agent, has recruited her to upload some spyware on her company's computer network from a flash drive. Adrift in the metropolis, Maggie has zero self-esteem and only the slimmest of personal ties to anyone, so this represents her chance to do something significant. Suffice it to say that her mission goes sideways. What at first appears to be a tale of spycraft and intrigue turns out to be something quite different a disturbing portrait of contemporary England, with its "drip-drip-drip of sour resentment" (pre- and post-Brexit) and the palpable anomie of London. Most important is the fraught relationship between the pitiable Maggie and the manipulative Harvey, a man of great anger and bitterness. This dark thriller is rife with the deadpan wit and trenchant observation that Herron's readers relish.)
Customer Reviews
Not as expected
I like Mick Herron’s writing. I like his characterizations, his descriptive prose, his timely insights into the modern psyche. I don’t particularly like this work. It reads as if it were aimed at being sold as a Netflix series. As with all of his work, we are given a front row seat into the thoughts and motivations of the characters, but there just isn’t that much happening here. A girl is kidnapped, held captive for years by a megalomaniac. Her sister discovers it and rescues her. It reminds me somewhat of Stephen Kings lastest works - short, simplistic, serializable and surfing along on the authors past works.
Excellent!
I read this in a day; couldn’t put it down because I had to know how it would end. I heartily recommend it.