At Risk: A Novel [Mass Market Paperback]

"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.

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