Word: rimington
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...Britain's equivalent of the FBI) who spars with a roguish male sidekick while chasing a bomb-toting Islamic terrorist and his "invisible" (blond, British and female) co-conspirator. The book follows the standard spy-novel formula, though the formula works with surprising elegance--perhaps because its author, Stella Rimington, is a former director general of MI5 who spent 30 years foiling the plots of baddies from Russia, the Middle East and Northern Ireland. Rimington was the duty officer the night a Bulgarian émigré died of ricin poisoning after being stabbed with an umbrella tip by a Bulgarian secret...
...have been paying large sums for fictionalized legal and criminal expertise. January alone saw high-profile books from Linda Fairstein, a 25-year veteran prosecutor in Manhattan's sex-crimes unit, as well as Bill Bonanno, an ex-mobster, and Joe Pistone, a Mafia-infiltrating ex-FBI agent. But Rimington, 69, is the biggest name in law enforcement yet to give fiction a go. She began working for MI5 in 1965, when, as the wife of a British diplomat in New Delhi, she was hired as a local office clerk. Upon her return to London, she started spying on Soviet...
...Rimington remained anonymous until 1992, when she was appointed MI5's first female director general. Previously the position was so sub-rosa that the agency didn't even acknowledge it existed, but in an attempt at post--cold war openness and, Rimington suspects, a fit of self-congratulatory pride at hiring a woman, Rimington was outed by her own government. "People were astonished," she says, laughing. "Particularly my neighbors who just thought I was a quiet old lady." Being the first public face of a counterespionage agency made her a high-value target for terrorists--the I.R.A. was very active...
After retiring in 1996, Rimington wrote Open Secret, a tell-little autobiography that gave her the confidence to try her hand at fiction. "I'm an addicted reader of John le Carré," she says, "so I figured, Why not?" She holed up for long stretches at her beach home in Norfolk, East Anglia, where much of At Risk is set, and leaned heavily on the assistance of novelist Luke Jennings. "I'm quite good at thinking up plots and characters, but I needed help with pacing," she explains...
...doing with Germans and Arabs and Pakistanis? Who had been killed? And most vitally of all, was there a terror connection?"). But these are quibbles. In a thriller, plot is all and once it gets going, At Risk is never less than compelling. The book was vetted--as was Rimington's first--by MI5, but they didn't strip out all the inside dope, which arrives in fascinating little flashes as Liz identifies obscure Russian ammunition, jokes about the macho idiots in MI6 (Britain's CIA) and delicately recruits a young Muslim agent. Most striking, though, is that with...