Ugh. Verbose verbosity x 100.

Not a good experience. This is a nice 25 page short story stretched to super-irritating novella length.

I probably skimmed 75% of it.

One quote worth noting -
<I>All those gadgets which once seemed gifts to the adulterous –mobile phones, email systems –were now links in the chains of evidence used to drag guilty parties through the divorce courts. So pens and paper were reached for instead, which she thought an improvement. An erotic email was pornographic, one more speck of dirt in the landfill of the internet.</i>

.

This story begins with Maggie sitting in a toilet, waiting until midnight before she creeps upstairs in the office building to upload something from a memory stick to the office computer system. Maggie believes that she has been recruited by MI5 as the building is a front for the Chinese government. Immediately, you are very suspicious of the character ‘Harvey’ who has recruited her and Maggie’s level of gullibility is stretched even further as the story goes on. This was a short read but not comparable to the Slough House series which I love.
Thanks to Netgalley for a free copy.

An unexpected clunk of disappointment

I was looking forward to this Mick Herron stand-alone hugely. Herron was a wonderful discovery for me last year with the excellent Slough House series which my book club chose the first of, and which sent me screaming for the rest of the series like a banshee.

I did try the first of his Zoe Boehm series, but found it rather too bloody for my tastes and thought there were some coincidences which just seemed a bit much, though I did enjoy Herron’s ability to spring genuine surprises

However….I do think the Slough House series are a joy – not least because though they are dark, they are also extremely witty and with a cast of characters we genuinely come to care about, however unappealing they might appear to be on one level.

I did have good hopes for this one, though I suspected it might be closer to a traditional thriller, despite the promise of an espionage linked, edgy beginning

As ever, Herron does spring surprises on his readers. The problem with this one (perhaps I have now read too many of his books and have sussed his tricks) is that I saw every one a mile off. To be honest, the horrible suspicion arose that there was a certain Herron-by-numbers a happening.

This was a very dark and bleak book indeed. The central characters are all pretty much without any redeeming features, and are more ‘types’ than anything else. This meant I found no one believable; they merely fit a kind of mould, and were firmly within a well-worn sub-genre of fiction. Which I can’t even describe as it would immediately reveal spoilers.
There is nothing, either to leaven the gloom, violence and darkness, no possibility of the welcome humour brought in Slough House, because none of the characters in this one are particularly quick thinking, or have the kind of mind that be flashed through with moments of wit. There are also a lot – A LOT of coincidences. The two ‘clues’ which brought our third major character into the plot journey and acted as ‘revelations’ for that character were pretty thin ones, to be honest

Sadly, I found the reading experience of this one leaden, and it left a bit of a bad taste.

I won’t be giving up on Herron – but am unlikely to follow him outside Slough House

I received this as a digital review copy from the publishers via NetGalley

I have read all of Mick Herron's Slough House series and adore them. They contain the similar level of clever and compelling prose, memorable characters, and deftly handled plots as John le Carré’s Smiley books. This, as you probably realise, is very high praise. I was therefore very keen to try some of Mick Herron's other work.

When I saw 'This Is What Happened' on Netgalley I was delighted to be given a copy to review.

'This Is What Happened' is very different to the Slough House books. A quick and easy read, it is remarkably tense from the first page, and the tension doesn't let up until the final page. It is also cleverly structured, with the story slowly revealed through the perspective of just three characters, making the story feel very claustrophobic.

The less you know about the plot the better, so try to resist reading any summaries.

'This Is What Happened' is taut and compelling, and will keep you absorbed and trying to second guess what it is going on. The ending was a little sudden, and slightly anticlimactic, but overall this still leaves me keen to read more of Mick Herron's non-Slough House books.

I have loved every one of Mick Herron's Slough House novels and tried the stand-alone This Is What Happened on the strength of them. It is nothing like as good.

It is hard to give an idea of the book without excessive spoilers, but although it appears to begin as an espionage novel in an exciting opening sequence, it becomes apparent very soon that all is not what it appears to be and the book develops into more of a run-of-the-mill thriller. Herron writes well (of course), but the plot and characters really didn’t convince me, with implausibilities and coincidences which stretched my tolerance well beyond its elastic limit.

So, I'm afraid I thought the book was rather silly, wholly unbelievable and simply unsatisfying as a book. I'm looking forward immensely to the next instalment of Jackson Lamb, but This Is What Happened didn't come anywhere near the quality of that series and I can't recommend it.

(My thanks to John Murray for an ARC via NetGalley.)

I would like to thank Netgalley and John Murray Press for an advance copy of This Is What Happened, a stand alone novel set in London.

Maggie Barnes is young, naïve, poorly educated, alone in London and ripe for adventure. This is what happened when she took up the challenge and went on adventure.

I thoroughly enjoyed This Is What Happened. Like all Mr Herron's novels there is a certain plausibility to the premise as some of it is based on a true case but, as usual, he pushes the boundaries and takes it further. I wasn't sure what to expect as I have only read the Jackson Lamb novels before. This is different as it has no humour and is more of a character study and an examination of modern day life in London where it is easy to disappear and not be missed. I must admit that I found much of it predictable with the exception of a couple of twists but Mr Herron has an exciting style of writing so it held my attention from start to finish. It is not a long novel so everything is packed in tightly with no padding or dull moments.

There is so much more I could write about the novel and the characters who are well developed and perhaps at the extreme end of recognisable but it's impossible to do without spoilers so I'll desist.

This Is What Happened is short and sharp so I have no hesitation in recommending it as a good read.

At the centre of Mick Herron’s latest novel is Maggie, a very lonely girl who suffers from zero self-esteem. There can be no other reason why she would fall for the lies of Harvey, as she knows him by. At times it is difficult to suspend disbelief unless one keeps on reminding oneself just how damaged Maggie is. Perhaps the author could have given just a little more of her back story through self-reflection – after all, she has plenty of time for this!
Maggie has been kidnapped but she thinks she’s been rescued. Persuaded that she’s a valuable source for MI5 (I know!), she is then conned into believing that she has killed an innocent man and must go into hiding just as the Chinese render the UK barely recognisable through an economic take-over. In reality, her ‘handler’, Harvey, is just a very dangerous predator who enjoys playing power games. Much of the novel focuses on how he treats Maggie, why she falls for his crazy story and the monotony of her life in his basement flat. He keeps her there for two years but begins to tire of her after meeting an attractive woman, Sue, at the same café where he picked up Maggie.
This is where the novel changes pace, and it needs to by this stage. Unlike ‘Room’ by Emma Donoghue, comparable in that a young woman has disappeared off the face of the earth after having been kidnapped by an older man, the action in ‘This is What Happened’ is only portrayed through an adult viewpoint (albeit Maggie’s naïve or Harvey’s perverted one) and so lacks the poignancy and originality of the innocent child’s view. To declare who Sue is would be to spoil the plot; however, her presence brings about plenty of change, the pace quickens whilst losing none of the important characterisation, and the reader is on tenterhooks wondering how the narrative will play out. Even on the last page we imagine there may be more for Maggie to come to terms with than a fundamentally different world, bearing in mind her newly introduced exercise regime!
My thanks to NetGalley and John Murray (publishers) for a copy of this book in exchange for a fair review.