I wasn’t overly impressed by this book. The description had me thinking it was something else but unfortunately it was a bit of a slow burn for me and I had to push through to not put it down early

Thanks very much to the publisher for the opportunity to read and review this title. Many thanks, Dave

You can'r fault Mick Herron, whether it's his slow horses or standalone books. This is both riveting and amusing.

This is What Happened by Mick Herron

I'm a huge fan of the Jackson Lamb thrillers and I went into this thinking I was getting a spy thriller, or indeed a good book. It isn't either, although you'd think it might be from the promising opening. To say more would be venturing into spoiler territory so I'll just leave it at this - if you want a spy thriller, read the impeccable Jackson Lamb books.

A disappointing psychological thriller with a plot spread so thinly. Expected more from the author of the Jackson Lamb series.

This is What Happened by Mick Heron is quite far removed from his characters in Slow Horses but it does have a spy theme.
Poor gullible Maggie, suckered in to spying for 'Five' by Harvey who is a work of his own fiction. Both characters have a touch of the Walter Mitty about them
Whilst the plot is simple enough it's the word craft of Heron which stitches it all together in to something very readable. The beautifully executed thought bubbles of unwitting Maggie held for two years in a basement flat, racked with guilt over a murder and wondering what the new world order would do to her if they found her. Dickon aka 'Harvey' (Maggies coercive jailer) decides that her use to him has passed and schemes her demise. Fortunately the cavalry ride over the horizon in the form of her sister Meredith to rescue her from the strange Dickon.

Can she do it without being killed herself?

Well. This is one of those things I never saw coming, that Mick Herron could write a book I didn't rate highly. 

Sadly though, here it is. Possibly I've been spoilt by the incredibly brilliant Slough House series, where the writing is genius, the plotting is superb and you just devour them first page to last. 

This is What Happened is a weird kind of hybrid, drawing on the "spy thriller" premise this author is so very good at but mish mashing it up with psychological thriller elements in Gone Girl style but it just doesn't work. Or at least it didn't for me.

The story is terribly predictable, although it started well enough it soon fell into disarray, with really quite nonsensical events. Maggie is entirely stupid. I don't mind character's misreading things or making wrong choices or whatever but Maggie is just simply stupid. 

It's a short book that packs no punch whatsoever and if I had been given it under a pseudonym or blind to the author I would not for even a second have picked the undoubtedly talented Mr Herron as it's creator. 

My rating reflects what I expected v what I got. If I'm honest this feels like a cash in attempt to fit in with the current trend and market for psych thrillers with that "twist you won't see coming " but most avid readers see from a mile away. 

I don't think the author's heart was in it to be fair. It just doesn't feel like him at ALL. 

I can't recommend it. Read Slow Horses instead would be my advice.

I was intrigued by the poor reviews This Is What Happened had received and wanted to know what all the fuss was about. I have read both the Slow Horse and Zoe Boehm series, love both, and couldn't see how this could be so bad.

As I started the book, I thought to myself, "Wait...What?!?", as Maggie's story unfolded. A bit deeper into the book, after a major shift, I lost heart and nearly stopped reading because it seemed so un-Mick Herron-y. Add to that the Brexit bashing and I nearly called it quits. I have had more than enough negativity regarding Brexit and people willfully misinterpreting the will of the British people to govern themselves with no overlord. We should be able to control our own destiny, make trade deals with whomever we choose and regain control of our fishing waters. It was democratically chosen by the people so let's get on with it and make it a success by working together. There. That's my mini-rant in answer to Mr. Herron's.

Anyway, I pressed on against my better judgement and suddenly the story made sense and had me hook, line and sinker. We went the long way around and I fully understand how others just didn't hang in there long enough for the pay off. It is a strange book, I grant you, but the third big revelation and the outcome lived up to the standard I appreciate from this author. As an experiment this may not have been a winner but the story being gob smacking and tricksy did deliver the goods in the end... but it took too long to get there for most, I suspect.

I'm a big fan of Herron's Slough House novels but I'm afraid this didn't grip me. Although it's short, it felt too long. There is an awful lot of mundane detail about office life etc. I appreciate that he is trying to show the texture of the daily life of the protagonist, to show how she was susceptible to being manipulated, but there was no spark or sense of defamiliarisation. DNF

Very disappointing.
Well written, but not very funny and a very thin plot.
Of the 3 main characters, one is plain nasty, one is terminally dim and one cares so little about her sister that she didn't notice she was missing for 2 years., but then, Remainers never did understand family :/
I should have listened to Sid and not bothered with it.

I loved the premise but there were several issues with this title for me. Firstly, there was a lot of repetition in the first quarter as though being told once it was presumed I wouldn't "get it". Secondly, the character, for a undercover spy didn't come off as a plausible candidate. She wasn't a strong female with flaws. She was a weak one. This made me question whether she was the right person for the job. And thirdly, the story for the first few chapters seemed to drag without moving beyond a staircase. When questions by the man who caught her in the corridor she went willingly and told him stuff relating to her job. No undercover cop would do that least of all an MI5 operative. For this reason it felt too far fetched, and I unfortunately couldn't relate either to the characters motivations, or behaviour.

When twenty-something Maggie Barnes moved to London, it was for a fresh start, to get away from a bad relationship and make something of herself – just like her oh-so-perfect sister.
Unfortunately, things didn’t go quite as she planned. Instead, she found herself in a small, grotty, flat with a minimum-wage job and no friends (bar seven twitter followers she doesn’t even know).
It’s no wonder then, that she jumps at the chance of doing something just a bit different – working with the security services to spy on her employer. She has, they say, the perfect cover – no one will look at her twice.
If it all sounds a bit far-fetched, it just might be. It’s hard for me to say more, however, without spoilers – making it a hard review to write too. What I can say is what’s in the blurb – after what is described as a life-or-death mission, Maggie goes missing…and no one seems to notice.
The problem with the blurb is it doesn’t really describe the book, and I have a feeling from some of the reviews on Goodreads, that people haven’t – therefore – gotten what they expected, especially his fans. Which is a shame. Because this is a highly enjoyable novel. You don’t have to waste much brain power on it, I will admit, but that’s not always the type of book I want to read.
I’ve never read any books by Herron before and I think he has a good writing style and, in This is What Happened, he’s created three interesting and somewhat baffling characters, all of whom are just a little bit lost – which explains how what seems like a simple situation at the beginning, can get so messy so quickly. Apparently it’s based on a true situation and is an apology of sorts to the real Maggie. I hope she has forgiven him.

It’s difficult to write about This is What Happened, for two reasons. One is that it is a novella, and it has a lot of tensions and changes and twists in it – the shorter the book, the less I feel able to reveal about it. So I am going to go with the publishers' description:
Something's happened.
A lot of things have happened.
If she could turn back time, she wondered how far she would go.
Twenty-six-year-old Maggie Barnes is someone you would never look at twice. Living alone in a month-to-month sublet in 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 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.
The second is that it’s by Mick Herron, so yes of course it has tension and changes and twists in it – but it is not part of his Jackson Lamb/Slough House series: it is a standalone. If it was by a different author I would be saying how clever and involving it was, sad and atmospheric and rather melancholic about the way London life can be for some people. But because of the author there are rogue thoughts from Satan involving missing the hideous Jackson Lamb, and wishing to be amused and entertained: the Slough House books are hilariously witty, while this one is not aiming at being funny.

So – if you are a Mick Herron fan you just have to take it as a filler till the next Slough House book comes. If you are not, then I can recommend it as a short sharp read. There are points where you will feel you are well ahead of the characters, but Herron always makes the next move unpredictable, and keeps you guessing. And always writes extremely well.

The yellow scarf is going to turn out to be important…

There are several other Mick Herron books on the blog.

Mick Herron, as we know by now from the elaborately labyrinthine twists of his wonderfully amusing accounts of the intelligence services in his Jackson Lamb/Slough House series, does the whole secrets thing well. And characters who have secrets. And characters who want desperately to keep those secrets hidden, so desperately, they're prepared to take desperate measures to keep them hidden.

This is What Happened is also about secrets and desperate measures but it's on a difference register and with a different focus from Herron's spook novels. Not that you would immediately recognise this, as the novel - a standalone work outside of the author's regular series - starts out with a young woman, Maggie Barnes, who is involved in a top secret espionage operation. Maggie is just an ordinary person, working in the mailroom of Quilp House, but she's been recruited by an MI5 agent, Harvey Wells, to keep an eye open for any irregular activity, as 'Five' have suspicions about the building being the centre of operations of a foreign power with hostile intentions and take-over plans. Who better to recruit than someone unassuming on the inside? Maggie is asked to insert a pen drive in one of the office computers one evening after work so that Intelligence can monitor activity, and... well, there it doesn't all go exactly to plan.

Inevitably however - this is still a Mick Herron novel after all - all is not as it seems. But I think not only will the reader expect that, they might initially be a little bit disappointed at how transparent the ruse seems to be when Maggie is forced to hide out in the basement of a 'safe house' as Harvey relates an improbably elaborate tale about the downfall of the whole infrastructure of the UK, now under the control of Chinese powers, that has followed in the wake of the operation. It seems unlikely, but there must be some purpose or reason being this elaborate fiction, and you're going to want to know how that plays out.

Without giving anything away - you really can't say too much about any Mick Herron novel - there are more revelations to come as events escalate. In This is What Happened it's a measured escalation that is not quite as explosive and messy as things tend to get in his Slough House books. As backgrounds are probed and identities, personalities and behaviours are revealed however, there is most certainly a similar impact of increasing tension and suspense about how we are going to recover from a situation that has spiralled out of control. If there's one thing we've learned from the Slough House books, someone will pay a costly price.

Which brings us to another area that is different from the Jackson Lamb novels. This is a rather more serious outing for Mick Herron, and I don't just mean that it doesn't have the same kind of witty exchanges, one-liners, personality conflicts and cutting sarcasm that comes with the author's satirical outlook on power, politics and policing in the UK during these times of heightened tensions. Even if it's not strictly in the spy thriller genre, much like his peripheral Jackson Lamb series novel Nobody Walks, Herron uses the conventions of the genre (and his particular skills in this area) to take a wider look at society, to how people live, to the secrets they keep and the desperate lengths they go to in order to keep them hidden.

Again that sounds like a fairly straightforward and conventional concept, but there is something particularly interesting about Herron's take on it, not least with the setting of the novel in London. Ironically, as Herron observes, in a place like London with CCTV cameras everywhere, with everyone tweeting their activities and lives

over social media, questions of identity, anonymity and secrets reaches a different level entirely, one that perhaps reveals more than we would suspect about the reality of life and maybe even about the nature of the British. Or perhaps This Is What Happened is just about one particularly gullible person, one particular person with a twisted view of women and one person determined to make up for missed opportunities to change things, which may indeed say more about wider events in contemporary society than you might think.

Twenty-six-year-old Maggie Barnes is someone you would never look at twice. Living alone in a month-to-month sublet in 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 thwart an international plot that puts all of Britain at risk.
I’ve read all of the Slough House novels by the author, which I enjoyed so expected to thoroughly enjoy this too but I must say I have mixed feelings about it. I think it was drawn out & would have read much better if it had been shorter & not so wordy. I started to skip paragraphs & I’m sue this wouldn’t have happened in a shorter read
.
My honest review is for a special copy I voluntarily read

I have to admit I struggled with the first 20/30 pages of this book as I thought it was going nowhere. A young woman, Maggie Barnes is trying to plug in a flash drive to a computer system at her place of work - at night, when she's not supposed to be there. She spends a long time in a toilet, trying to avoid security guards and motion sensors. Then, she has to set off a fire alarm and things really get out of hand.

Gradually the story broadens out and we discover more about Maggie's background. She moved to London to escape an abusive relationship and she has a sister Meredith, already living in the city who is very successful and has a life which Maggie envies. She feels vulnerable and alone and jumps at the chance to help out Harvey, an agent with M15, the United Kingdom's counter-intelligence and security agency.

Harvey explains that the firm in Quilp House where she works is up to no good and he wants her to help him find out a way to stop them from causing problems for Great Britain. And so, Maggie did as she was asked and suddenly, it's 2 years later and Maggie is living in an MI5 safe house with Harvey as her only visitor. And, it's possible she killed someone at Quilp House.

Meanwhile, we discover that Harvey is not all he seems. And her sister Meredith has finally discovered that Maggie is missing.

Mick Herron peppers the story with his usual dark humour and wry observations on the people of London, their hopes and dreams and their politics! As the mystery of Maggie's role as an MI5 asset becomes clearer, so to is the reason for Harvey's insistence that she cannot leave the safe house. And what to do about her missing sister causes Meredith to make some uncomfortable decisions as, slowly but surely, these people's worlds begin to collide.

The author asks us to make at least one major suspension of belief, but - after all - it's a work of fiction and, despite the title, it didn't really happen.

The great thing about writing stand-alone novels is that it gives you the chance to introduce new characters and do anything you like with them. There’s no expectation management of the reader involved. So I wasn’t sure what Mick Herron would serve up after his Slough House Series which is such a stunning success and completely bowled me over.

In essence, what he has delivered is a two act, three-handed thriller; just ripe for a stage adaptation. This book, slightly longer than a novella but still a quick read, has Herron’s beautiful use of language and skillfully written prose as well as the dry acerbic humour we have come to love.

Our main characters here are among life’s losers. Maggie is a loner in London. Working in a mail room of an anonymous big corporation and living in a shared flat where the other occupants don’t mingle or even speak to each other, Maggie’s social life involves a quick scurry past the other flat residents while heading for the loo, or tweeting her mundane life to her 6 followers, several of whom are bots.

Then Harvey comes into Maggie’s life. Not quite the tall dark, handsome stranger, but still, the first man she has spoken to more than in passing since her last relationship broke up some years ago. Harvey is cultivating Maggie and in doing so he makes her feel relevant, wanted and for the first time important.

But who is Harvey and what is he really after?

Well structured, nicely plotted and with some stand out moments (Harvey going shopping) this is funnier than it should be for such a macabre tale.

It didn’t hit the heights of the Slough House series for me, but as a stand alone it works well and I really enjoyed it.

Mick Herron is probably best known for writing the excellent Jackson Lamb spy thrillers series of which I am a fan. This book however is a departure from that series and is a standalone novel but don't worry the author has still delivered a brilliant book.

The book is excellently written and the main characters are well fleshed out and each are definitely unique. The dialogue is realistic.

The story moves along at a pace and I found it almost unputdownable. Well you do have to stop to eat!!

There are a number of twists and turns. Usually just as you think that you have solved the problem.

Overall this is an excellent book and one I would thoroughly recommend without hesitation

I am a huge fan of Mick Herron’s Jackson Lamb series and so was delighted to get a copy of this new, stand-alone, novel. Having finished it, I feel it is both difficult to review (without giving spoilers) and also very different from Slough House. Indeed, if you read this looking for similarities, you will be disappointed. This is very different, both in terms of being both a more straight forward telling of the story and in terms of the characters.

Maggie Barnes is a young woman who has recently come to London and, so far, she is not having the exciting and thrilling time she hoped for. The only person she knows in the city is her sister and she doesn’t see her that often. She has a lowly job in the post room of a office block and her one treat is coffee and cake in the park tea room after work. It is there that she meets Harvey Wells, who approaches her with a story that suddenly makes life far more interesting and dangerous…

I possibly read too many thrillers, but I could see where this was going, in terms of plot twists, far before it got there. That surprised me; especially as Mick Herron is the master of exciting and unusual storylines. However, although the story was, I felt, fairly obvious, I did enjoy the characters. I particularly liked the naïve, young Maggie. A woman who is doing her best to survive in the city and yet, despite having a job, is lonely and somewhat isolated. Overall, an enjoyable read, but not, perhaps, Herron’s most memorable work. I received a copy of this book from the publisher, via NetGalley, for review.

I was unable to finish this book and this came as a complete surprise to me, as I adore the Slough House series. Perhaps I was a victim of my own high expectations as I struggled to even believe this was a Mick Herron book. Anyway, I reached 42% of this book before I finally called it quits. Many apologies but it just failed to hold my interest. Many thanks to John Murray Press for an ARC.