As Barrett cast off from the dock and motored away from Port Hope, farther out into the bay, toward the open sea, the morning sun was winning the fight with the fog and the breeze had come to its aid, pushing back the fog in long gusts like strokes of a whisk broom.

This Michael Koryta guy is some kind of writer. I haven’t found a dud from his hand yet. How It Happened is a splendid narrative about an imperfect man struggling to find the truth.

Rob Barrett is an FBI agent. He’s young in terms of experience, but has a reputation as an expert on interrogations. He’s sent to the town of Port Hope, Maine, to try to break a missing persons case, because he spent some time there during his troubled youth.

The two missing are a young couple, Jackie Pelletier and Ian Kelly. Jackie is the only daughter of a widowed fisherman, and the light of his life. Ian is the son of a prominent local citizen with political pull – which is why the FBI has been called in.

Rob does what he does, and finds a young woman, Kimmy Crepeaux, who admits to participating in the killing of the two young people, and is eaten up with guilt. She names the murderer as a local handyman with an immaculate reputation – though Rob knows him better than most people and considers him a plausible suspect. But Kimmy is a junky and a loser, a person with no credibility. Nevertheless, Rob gets the police busy searching for the bodies where Kimmy said they’d be – and they are not there. Instead, they show up at last 200 miles away. Rob is disgraced, and exiled to “FBI Siberia” in Montana.

But he can’t give it up. There’s more to the case, he’s certain, and he goes back to Port Hope on his own time, determined to discover what really happened. His informants tell him he’s thinking too small, that the case is way bigger than he suspects. Will he be able to handle the truth once he finds it?

I was impressed with the writing in How It Happened. I was impressed with the characters, the dialogue, and the plot. I was impressed by the depth of the author’s compassion. I enjoyed the book more than I can say.

Highly recommended. Cautions for the usual.