Customer Reviews

At Risk (Liz Carlyle)

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(7)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

"At Risk" is a sharp edged first-class debut by an author who well knows her subject. The first woman director general of Britain's MI5, Stella Rimington, lived the perils and pitfalls found in this amazing spy thriller. She experienced the inner office politics encountered as a woman in a man's world, and faced the realities of terrorist attacks. After 25 years experience she is now a counter-terrorism expert and she brings all of her expertise to bear in penning her first novel.

Akin to the author herself protagonist Liz Carlyle is an Intelligence Officer with consummate smarts. In a male dominated profession, she's a bit of an in-your-face gal wearing high heels and designers duds. While most of her colleagues at Thames House tend to be drably dressed, Liz "often spent Saturday afternoons combing the antique clothing stalls in Camden Market for quixotically stylish bargains which, while they infringed no Service rules, certainly raised a few eyebrows."

Her one flaw seems to be found in affairs of the heart - her married boyfriend is really a louse. He's a man who "...had always had an unerring instinct for the tradecraft of adultery." Ah, well, not even Liz can know everything.

What she would very much like to know, actually needs to know is how to identify the terrorists who are able to cross borders because of their ethnic identity with the country they're entering. Almost before we know it our heroine is head to head with Al Qaeda and their like. She has consulted with her agents and determined that there is more than a probable terrorist threat - it's very possible. Suspense builds as each day and hour brings this possibility closer.

Liz is aided in her search by her superior, Charles Wetherby, a rather enigmatic but intriguing married man. It's obvious early on that Liz's growing interest in him is more than professional admiration.

Stella Rimington raises the bar for thriller writers with her compelling observation to detail, and shows a deft ability to create mounting suspense as the story unfolds.

- Gail Cooke

Stella Rimington's "At Risk" is everything a spy novel should be. It's timely, intricate, deeply psychological, action-packed, and suspenseful. The heroine is Liz Carlyle, a member of M15, Britain's domestic military intelligence division. She has risen in the ranks because she is super-competent, extremely sharp, and obsessed with being the best at what she does. Liz has sacrificed the very idea of home and family; she is married to her job.

When Liz gets together with her colleagues in the Joint Counter-Terrorism Group, she learns that Islamic terrorists may be deploying an "invisible" to stage an attack in Great Britain. An "invisible" is an individual who is Western in appearance and has the credentials to blend into his or her surroundings undetected by the authorities. When the mysterious killing of a shadowy figure named Ray Gunter occurs soon after this information is released, alarm bells go off. Gunter was shot with a special type of sophisticated weapon that would unavailable to an ordinary street thug. In addition, Gunter may have been involved in the smuggling of illegal immigrants into England. Could one of these illegals be a terrorist at large? This gives Liz and her team all of the ammunition that they need to start an investigation into a possible act of violence to be carried out in the near future on English soil.

The characters in "At Risk" are all skillfully depicted. Besides Liz, there is her steady boss, Wetherby, who seems to understand Liz better than she does herself. Much to her chagrin, Liz is suddenly forced to work with Bruno Mackay, a member of M16, Britain's foreign military intelligence division, who knows a great deal about the Pakistani terrorist scene. Mackay is an arrogant and handsome man who is as supercilious as he is charismatic. In addition, Rimington goes to great pains to delve into the minds of the terrorists. Rather than dismissing them as crazed and suicidal ideologues, she shows them to be troubled individuals whose agenda has as much to do with deep emotional pain as it does with political and religious philosophy. This gives "At Risk" a depth and complexity that run-of-the-mill spy thrillers often lack.

Rimington has a smooth and fast-paced style. The dialogue is funny, biting, hard-hitting, and realistic. Since Rimington worked for thirty years in Britain's Secret Service and was the first female director general of M15, she knows a great deal about subversion, espionage, and counter-terrorism. Therefore, it is not surprising that "At Risk" is filled with fascinating details about the workings of England's various security organizations.

With all this, "At Risk" would not have worked half as well if Rimington weren't such a terrific storyteller. She plunges us into a dark and forbidding world of hatred, vengeance, murder, and desperation, and she provides no pat answers for the problems posed in the book. "At Risk" is one of the best spy novels of the year and I recommend it highly.

In my far from extensive reading of espionage novels I think this is the first since Maugham's Ashenden, which is a different kind of book entirely, where I have actually been able to follow the plot. There are probably two reasons for this. One is that the author is a top-level intelligence insider, and one who reached the top through working up within the organisation, and who consequently knows and is able to convey the real feel of it. The other, I suspect, is that she is a newcomer to fiction-writing who has not quite mastered the trick of bamboozlement, although of course it may also be that she has no interest in that and that nothing was further from her intention.

Dame Stella Rimington has, to my way of thinking, a very attractive cast of mind, at least to the extent that it shows in this book. By her own admission her 'narrator' (to all intents and purposes) has a lot of herself in her. If she had tried to suggest otherwise I would not have believed her for an instant. I enjoyed the ironic little asides, especially the one about publishing memoirs in the teeth of official disapproval. I liked this kind of professionalism in respect of the job too. It is the mind-set of a reasonable, dedicated but level-headed woman with a sense of humour and a sense of proportion, making the best sense she can of the terrorist mentality without either ideological blindness on the one hand or fuzzy-headed liberalism on the other. She even shows an engaging detachment regarding her 'narrator's own emotional involvement, and it may be that organising that side of it into a story was a help to her personally. The character-drawing is distinctly good, I should say, although I am curious to know why she chose the name Ray Gunter in one case. A certain Ray Gunter was minister of labour in Harold Wilson's first cabinet in 1964, and Dame Stella is of an age to remember him at least as well as I do. Those were the days when a Labour government was deeply suspect in the intelligence community as having dark and improbable links with a supposed international communist conspiracy, and it could be that they sought such tendencies even in the wholly unprogressive Gunter, a figure as deeply unalluring as the thuggish fisherman and people-smuggler in her tale. Her device of introducing one or two minor characters as observers of the scene here and there works quite well for me, adding a bit of variety to the narrative. The style of writing is light, racy and enjoyable for the most part, though she and her editors between them might have tidied up a few slipshod touches. In particular even in this day and age someone ought to have known that `tempus mutantur' is a howling solecism, and there was a time when no reputable publisher, probably no disreputable one either, would have let `who's' through for `whose'.

The plot-line is good and well sustained in general. I don't know whether the 'narrator's intention to break off her affair was meant to be left hanging in the way it is, but my main difficulty with the story was actually that the intended terrorist atrocity seems, by the standards we are coming to know, comparatively minor. In one respect Dame Stella is ambiguous, and I hope intentionally so. Right at the beginning of the book the 'narrator' highlights the co-operative attitude of the various security agencies in response to the prime minister's demand that turf-wars must not happen in the post-9/11 environment. Right at the end we find out what has actually happened in that respect. The 'narrator' does not emphasise the contrast, and I wonder what the author means us to think. The way the actors behave is not something unique to the world of security, it is what happens in big organisations generally. There is more to intelligence than intelligence in either sense of the word, and Dame Stella can't have reached the position she did without finding that out at an early stage.

Rimington's first novel is a good example of a small-scale contemporary novel of intrigue and espionage. Unlike Tom Clancy, she does not fling divisions across oceans, nor are the terrorists able to call on great organizations once they are in country.

Her primary terrorist is not from the usual hate-the-west-in- general school. Instead, he has a particular event to avenge. The other terrorist is well-drawn as a young woman whose life has so starved her emotionally that she needs a cause to make herself whole. Both of these are perfectly understandable and make good sense.

The Brits are drawn from various types, with a moderated version of the vicious turf fights recounted in other Brit spy novels and which make American readers wonder how they ever get anything done.

The heroine is competent, clever, and has streaks of genius, which are to be expected in someone who has risen to her level. You can't get there by plodding.

There are a couple of problems with the book. The first hard clue that gives a starting point to the search for the "invisible" terrorist is the discovery of an armor-piercing bullet at the scene of a murder. It was also a silent shooting. Those who know something of guns are going to be puzzled. Armor-piercing from a pistol? Silent? How do you do that? Rimington attempts to explain it in terms which are hard to follow unless you simply accept the premise. And if you know something about guns, you won't accept the premise without considerably more and clearer explanation. I think I know something about guns and I don't think you can fire a silenced AP round from a pistol, and if you can, Rimington's explanation was unclear. The explanation should have been done better or a different clue should have been used. It was an unnecessary distraction and slowed attention.

At another point, there is an explosion which wounds several people with shrapnel, in a situation where the existence of shrapnel would have been minimal.

At various times, the protagonist gets a call that there is important information coming over her computer. So she hauls out the laptop, fires it up and gets the scoop. This happens in pubs out in the country or temporary command centers. Is all England a wi-fi hot zone? If the computer is being hooked up to a line in the back of the pub, I missed it. Do all pubs have DSL?

In fiction, the author must follow the rules. One of the rules is that, no matter how far-fetched the fictional character, when the character encounters the real world, it has to work as the reader knows the real world. To do otherwise is to reach out from the book, pop the reader in the nose and remind him that this is just ink on paper. The willing suspension of disbelief is damaged.

The female terrorist's epiphany toward the end of the book needs more explanation. We are told how she got to be one way in some detail and having a major change of heart away from that goes too fast.

Having registered the complaints, I have to say that this is a great fictional treatment of the sort of thing we will be facing for the forseeable future. The individual on an individual mission, carrying his danger in his head and using locally available materials to commit an atrocity only killing less than half a dozen people is going to be a terrible problem to solve, and the terrorist organizations can generate a lot of them. Rimington's book could be considered, in addition to its other merits, a procedural on the subject. The problem is that she uses a fairly substantial proportion of the resources available to the nation to catch this twosome. What if there were ten of them?

When the ex-head of Britain's MI5 desides to write a mystery novel you's expect it to be both technically accurate and filled with examples of well constructed tradecraft. What you might not expect is that the crafting of her characters would be so well developed and the writing so well handled.

The story revolves around a prospective terrorist action that is undefined but which is believed to be done by an 'invisible', that is a person in CIA talk who is a native of the country. He has the proper paperwork, a true history, even a family and friends to vouch for him. How do you find such a person? It makes for a damn good story.

Also interesting is the interplay between the various agencies involved. The petty bickering, the CYA. It's far more important to keep your organization clean than to find the bad guy.

At the end I found myself asking, "What do you say to the parents."

At Risk is essentially of the 'spy thriller' genre, & the strength of the book is the level of detail surrounding the story the author provides. Put simply, how do the fictional terrorists in At Risk approach their mission, and how do the authorities try to prevent it. This aspect of the novel is the most satisfying. At times it reads almost like journalism in describing events that occur in the book. The author writes in a concise & interesting way about events, places, and so on.

The weakness of the book is in the characters. Too many are rather one-dimensional and/or stereotypical. The taciturn but nonethless brilliant M15 supervisor the heroine works under. The sexy officer from rival M16 the heroine must watch out for while they work together. The awkward neglected teenager that finds eastern religion, & ends up becoming a terrorist, simply because she wants to be someone important and/or loved. The characters are more like social traits than people. They are not rounded enough to be truly impressive or memorable. This was the books weakness for me. There are no surprises or original ideas in most of the characters.

Rimington's main character, Liz Carlyle, is not wholly successful as a fictional creation who can sustain a whole book. She does alot of investigating, which carries the book a very along way. However the fact that she is continually presented as clever/intelligent/smart/brilliant etc, gets a bit annoying.

The author also tries to make Liz interesting by giving her 'issues' in her life. A sexy but inappropriate boyfriend, a mother who apparenty doesn't understand her career, problems with chauvinism in the workplace, etc. However all this just seems intended to spice her up as a character, & it doesn't work. Somehow it doesn't ring true. It just makes her seem like a creation which the author doesn't quite know what direction yet to send in.

Overall the book is a real pageturner though. You keep telling yourself "just one more chapter then I'll stop reading". I will definitely read another novel by Stella Rimington as she can write an engaging thriller. As this was her first book I expect the strengths of her writing will continue, & some the problems will be ironed out.

I read this book, as many of the books that I read, because I "heard" that it was good. This one is. It is a "spy thriller" that keeps you guessing until the last page. The pace is fast...

One thing that I enjoyed is that I did not feel like a fool for not seeing the end....o.k.....other readers might have caught on before I did, but, I felt that Ms. Remington was honest with her readers, and let us try to unravel the "situation" in the same time that her protagonist "Liz" did. Thank you, Ms. Remington for a good read. I look forward to your next.

I really enjoyed this book. I was a little suspicious seeing the "From the former head of MI5" written on the cover. These marketing ploys by publishers get worse and worse lately. So, I picked it up with some reservations. But, I was not at all dissapointed. The story is wonderfully crafted. A whole lot of apparently unrelated bits and pieces of information get pulled togther, and this story was wonderfully realistic. One wonders if it perhaps comes from some MI5 files that the public will, of course, never get to hear about!!
AT RISK opens with an introduction to Liz Carlyle, the key character in the novel, currently an agent-runner with the counter-terrorism unit of MI5. Liz, while bumping heads with colleagues thanks to the usual inter-offfice, and indeed, intra-office politics in a male-dominated workplace, is also confidently supported by Charles Wetherby, her superior at MI5. We then witness the entrance into the UK of an "invisible", a terrorist and/or terrorist aid who can pass off for a local, and this invisible facilitates the entry into the UK of an arab terrorist. The plot takes off from there, and any further information would be a plot spoiler! It is certainly a fascinating and exciting story. And, with so much coverage of terrorism in the popular fiction today, this was a refreshingly original piece of story-telling (listen up, Vince Flynn!).
One cannot help but wonder how much the key character, Liz Carlyle, is actually Stella Rimmington. Carlyle's character is extremely well developed, and we get to learn a lot about her. In fact, all of the characters in the novel felt very real to me. I wholeheartedly recommend it!

After a slow, almost tedious start, Stella Rimington crafts a spy story with a narrative drive that builds, captures, and often surprises the persistent reader on its way to a satisfying, unexpected ending.

As would be expected of a writer who was the first woman director-general of MI5, Britain's intelligence service, Rimington creates a main character who relies on steady, logical detection. Liz Carlyle, an agent-runner in the MI5 Joint Counter-Terrorist Group, consciously uses the familiar elements of "who, what, where, when, why, and how" as she tries to outwit the terrorists and, all too often, those who are supposed to be on her side.

The "who" and "what" quickly become evident. An "invisible," a young white British woman, who has fallen deeper and deeper into the Jihadist world, links with a Tajik man to commit acts of terrorism in Britain. Opposed to the terrorists are Liz, Head of Section Charles Wetherby, and a number of law and intelligence operatives who help, hinder, sabotage, or doublecross (sometimes all) Liz and Charles. The author keeps adding depth to this knowledge as the characters and their motivations become clearer.

The "where, when, why, and how" are developed through dialogue, episodes, character musings, and flashbacks, until, little by little, the reader understands why the terrorists have chosen their target and why they are terrorists. Even so, the author keeps adding surprises for the reader.

Rimington's writing is uneven. When she is detailing the spy story parts, the dialogue, descriptions, actions, and motivations ring true. In Liz and Charles, she has created characters who well could be the focus of future books. More awkwardly handled are the portions describing Liz's personal life and motivations, and readers may find themselves skipping or skimming these pages. The contrast between Liz's messy personal and competent professional lives may be intended to develop a more complex character. The result, however, is to provoke reader impatience, especially as her romantic interests are so very inappropriate and these characters are so poorly developed. Liz's life outside work might have been revealed slowly, small portion by small portion, as Rimington did with the spy story, to better effect. The long, slow beginning to the book, intended to help readers become familiar with characters and settings, may cause some to put aside the book too soon. Rimington may have been better served by beginning on a more dynamic note.

The spy story is superb; the life story is disposable.

At Risk, Rimington's debut spy thriller shows her potential as a writer but, overall, the book has too many flaws to consider it as anything more than just an okay read. Rimington, the former head of Britain's MI5, creates an interesting plot premise -- the British Intelligence Joint Counter-Terrorism Group has uncovered information about the ultimate intelligence nightmare. That is, a terrorist group may have activated an "invisible" agent (i.e., an ethnic native of the target country who can cross its borders unchecked and go unnoticed) in order to set up the foundation for monstrous harm. It is up to Rimington's main character, Intelligence Officer Liz Carlisle to analyze the information from her agents to determine if there is, indeed, an imminent terrorist threat and, if so, to figure out the invisible's point of entry. In the process of establishing At Risk's plot, Rimington works hard at creating an understanding of what the professional and personal life is like for a female Intelligence Officer employed in this tradional all-male environment and at introducing the reader to many secondary characters. Thoughout the first half of this book Rimington succeeds pretty well in telling an interesting story and in maintaining this reader's interest. However, in the second half of the book, I found the plot getting so bogged down in the extensive amount of information analyses that Carlisle had to do that, while this may be very realistic of the job of an Intelligence Officer, my attention level steadily diminished to the point that I was skimming certain passages in order to get to "the finish line." Further, the ending, while again realistic, was neither very surprising nor particularly thrilling. Further, in my opinion Rimington left too many of the threads untied in regards to Liz Carlisle's realtionships with some of the secondary characters. Hopefully, Rimington will tie these threads together in her next book, which I will probably read given the promise she ehibited in her debut.