At Risk (Liz Carlyle Series #1) » (~)

Stella Rimington joined Britain's Security Service (MI5) in 1969. During her nearly thirty-year career she worked in all the main fields of the Service's responsibilities—counter-subversion, counter-espionage, and counter-terrorism—and became successively director of all three branches. Appointed director general of MI5 in 1992, she was the first woman to hold the post and the first director general whose name was publicly announced on appointment. Following her retirement from MI5 in 1996, she became a non-executive director of Marks and Spencer and published her autobiography, Open Secret, in the United Kingdom. She is currently at work on her next novel.

An announcement is made at a meeting of the British Intelligence Joint Counter-Terrorist group: "The opposition may be about to deploy an invisible." An "invisible" is CIA-speak for the ultimate intelligence nightmare: a terrorist who is an ethnic native of the target country and who can therefore cross its borders unchecked, move around the country unquestioned, and go unnoticed while setting up the foundation for monstrous harm.

Intelligence officer Liz Carlyle has had to prove herself in countless ways as she's come up through the ranks of the traditionally all-male world of Britain's Security Service, MI5. But this announcement marks the start of an operation that will test all her hard-won knowledge and experience-and her intelligence and courage-as nothing has before. Having analyzed information from her agents, she realizes that there is indeed an imminent terrorist threat. She may even have the invisible's point of entry. But what she cannot draw out of all the...

The Washington Post - Patrick Anderson

On the one hand, Rimington celebrates the analytical genius of her alter ego and, on the other, she seems to be saying it's mostly dumb luck when terrorists are caught. It's a mixed message but probably an accurate one. What is not mixed is her portrayal of intelligence agents whose personal egos and institutional rivalries are such that we are left wondering if they -- or their American counterparts, whose egos and rivalries are surely no less monumental -- could protect anyone from anything.