Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An excellent first novel (3.5 stars from me)!, 23 Oct 2005
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!
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic, really enjoyed it. Can't wait for next one Stella, 28 Jul 2004
Took this book on holiday to Aruba, unsure if I should because it was a large hardback but couldn't wait to start it. Very difficult to put down and continue with various vacation activities. Its well written, thought provoking, fast moving, very exciting, interesting but believable characters and an easy read. What I really liked about the way it was written was that it was discriptive but all the unecessary 'waffle' was left out, that often bulks up novels. Its one of those books that you can't wait to find out whats going to happen and then sorry when its all over. I was lucky to see Richard & Judys interview with Stella Rimington just before we left UK and liked her very much. My husband had met her around 1995 after she became head of M15 so was naturally intrigued by this book and desperate for me to finish so he could get his hands on it. He too read it all in a few days. My son(17yrs) also became interested and has the book now. We maybe didn't get to see as much of Aruba as we wanted to but enjoyed lots of good discussions afterwards and it gave us a much needed relaxing time reading in the sun. In her R+J interview Stella said she had lots of plots to write about so we just can't wait for the next one.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
INTELLIGENCE, 30 Jan 2005
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. 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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