New York Times-bestselling author Michael Koryta returns with a thrilling new standalone crime novel and a rugged new investigator, an FBI interrogation specialist.

And that is how it happened. Can we stop now?

Kimberly Crepeaux is no good, a notorious jailhouse snitch, teen mother, and heroin addict whose petty crimes are well-known to the rural Maine community where she lives. So when she confesses to her role in the brutal murders of Jackie Pelletier and Ian Kelly, the daughter of a well-known local family and her sweetheart, the locals have little reason to believe her story.

Not Rob Barrett, the FBI investigator and interrogator specializing in telling a true confession from a falsehood. He's been circling Kimberly and her conspirators for months, waiting for the right avenue to the truth, and has finally found it. He knows, as strongly as he's known anything, that Kimberly's story-a grisly, harrowing story of a hit and run fueled by dope and cheap beer that becomes a brutal stabbing in cold blood-is how it happened. But one thing remains elusive: where are Jackie and Ian's bodies?

After Barrett stakes his name and reputation on the truth of Kimberly's confession, only to have the bodies turn up 200 miles from where she said they'd be, shot in the back and covered in a third person's DNA, the case is quickly closed and Barrett forcibly reassigned. But something still nags at locals, and at a local newspaper reporter who's been chasing the story as doggedly as Barrett himself.

Reminiscent of both the epic and adventurous early writing of Stephen King and the white-knuckled action of Lee Child (both of whom have anointed Koryta as the next great thriller writer), How it Happened is a frightening, tension-filled ride into the dark heart of rural America.