This is What Happened – Mick Herron
Mick Herron, as we know by now from the elaborately labyrinthine twists of his wonderfully amusing accounts of the intelligence services in the 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...