Secret Asset (Liz Carlyle Series #2) » (~)

Stella Rimington joined MI5 in 1965 and during her thirty-year career she worked in all the main fields of the Service's responsibilities--counter-subversion, counter-espionage, and counter-terrorism--and successively became 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 UK.

From the author of the bestselling At Risk comes a tense and fast-paced new thriller featuring MI5 Intelligence Officer Liz Carlyle.

When Liz Carlyle learns that suspicious meetings have been taking place at an Islamic bookshop, she feels instinctively that a terrorist cell is at work. She reports this to Charles Wetherby, the Director of Counter Terrorism, who immediately puts a surveillance operation into place. So Liz is shocked when Wetherby suddenly takes her off the case after receiving a tip-off that a mole has been planted in one of the branches of British Intelligence. Now Liz must undertake the momentous task of uncovering and exposing the mole before it's too late.

The Washington Post - Richard Lipez

Rimington actually ran MI5, the British spy agency, for four years in the 1990s, and there's plenty of procedural verisimilitude here. Too much authenticity can be a hindrance in this type of crime fiction, however. While real-life investigations can be plodding, a ticking-bomb thriller that just ambles along is frustrating. Secret Asset eventually does get up a head of steam, though. And its subplot involving a suspected IRA mole inside British intelligence dovetails convincingly with the main plot in which Middle Eastern terrorists scheme to blow up a beloved British institution.