How It Happened (by Michael Koryta)

Thanks to a reading challenge I decided to participate in this year on the Litsy app, I am reading beloved authors on my bookshelves that I have drifted from. (Sometimes I wonder if my obsession for books will eventually collapse on me. Haha.) Michael Koryta is an excellent writer of stories that check the boxes on mystery, crime, suspense, and thriller — and How It Happened reminded me exactly why I fell for him in the first place.

Set in rural Maine, FBI investigator Rob Barrett returns to Port Hope, the small coastal town where he spent summers as a teenager, to help solve the double murder of a promising local couple. He manages to extract a confession — something no other investigator had been able to do — from notorious jailhouse informant Kimberly Crepeaux, a young heroin addict and single mother. Her detailed account seems to close the case quickly. But when her story begins to unravel, the case is abruptly shut down, and Barrett must confront buried secrets from his own past, a lost love, and the dark underbelly of his community to uncover the truth.

The structure of the story is creative — it opens with Kimberly's confession, so the reader thinks they know exactly how the double murder happened. Or do we? Was Kimberly being honest, or simply living up to her reputation as a liar? That's the task at hand for Barrett, who is known as an expert at detecting deception. The suspense here doesn't necessarily come from twists, but from the intensity of the investigation itself and the way the stakes steadily rise.

Koryta develops characters that are both easy and difficult to care about, and his writing conveys genuine empathy for them from the very start. I felt my heart sink into this book as my mind worked to solve the mystery alongside Barrett.

Overall, How It Happened is a tense, character-rich thriller with a vivid sense of place and emotional weight. Koryta delivers another winner that kept me fully invested until the final page. Highly recommended for fans of thoughtful, atmospheric crime fiction.

I must admit, I’m a bit proud to say that my copy is a signed first edition, which I purchased from the renowned Poisoned Pen bookstore in Scottsdale, Arizona.

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