50 Book Challenge: book 35
At Risk - Stella Rimington
This is a thriller with an impeccable pedigree. The author is a former chief of MI5, the first person ever to publicly hold the post, and she also served as Director of each of its three major branches – counter-subversion, counter-terrorism and counter-espionage. Her appointment to the top job topped off a career of some 35 years in intelligence. When a figure like this decides to write a novel their credentials are not in doubt – but their ability to string a plot and a sentence together sometimes can be. So fans of thrillers like me can come to books like this with some trepidation.
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If you pick it up, and hold it, and look at the cover you find nothing but reassurance. It’s fat and comfortably heavy and my edition, at least, has a blurb from The Observer saying “A cracking good thriller.” The colours are nice and bold and the font one of those distressed ones that looks as if someone has been at the cover with sandpaper. So all the elements for this to be very good appear to be in place. Just one final question to be answered. Is it actually any good?
I have worked out that I read more crime fiction but prefer thrillers. The reason for this is it seems that there is a better chance of picking up a random crime novel and finding it enjoyable. It is no secret that there are an awful lot of bad thrillers in this world and that anyone spending a few quid on a bookshop three-for-two offer has an unreasonably good chance of finding themselves in possession of one. But the experience of reading a really gripping thriller, the edge-of-your-seat page-turner that stops you concentrating on anything else until you’ve finished it, that’s one of the best experiences that reading has to offer me. And it’s why I like Dan Brown, incidentally, but that’s another set of arguments.
This book, I am happy to report, is an edge-of-your-seat page-turner. It deals with a nightmare scenario for the intelligence services – an ‘invisible’, a terrorist who, while being indoctrinated in jihad on the north-west frontier, is an ethnic native of Britain and a UK passport-holder. It deals with the attempts of the intelligence services, personified in the heroine Liz Carlyle, to track this invisible before she can wreak havoc. She must fight attacks on various fronts in order to do this, including emotional and political ones.
The story is well-paced and the writing style nicely underplayed and unobtrusive with the author showing an excellent ear for dialogue. The plot’s nice and twisty and keeps you guessing until the last few pages. I had a slight problem with the establishing chapters – I felt too many different characters and situations were being introduced in too short an order – but that is honestly my only problem with it. It was a nice, quick, satisfying read with oodles of lovely but at the same time entirely innocuous detail about intelligence work.
Even though there are various lovers on the horizon, real and potential, the fact the heroine is a woman is not used as an excuse for the story to descend into a lot of silly mush. As I have said loudly and often, if I wanted to read romances, I would go into a bookshop, find the romance section and buy books with pink covers and twizzly fonts. I want to read good, gripping, tense and action-packed thrillers and luckily that’s exactly what I got here. Not the best I ever read but competent and entertaining. And what more could you really ask for?