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With At Risk, Dame Stella Rimington's first novel, she is probably aware that she'll be under negative pressure for her literary efforts quite as she was for her true-life revelations concerning the world of spooks in her autobiography Open Secret.

In fact At Risk is a strikingly assured debut, with a female perspective on the secret world (via Rimington's heroine Liz) that is as fresh as it is plausible. Rimington's position in MI5 led to the inevitable comparisons with Judi Dench's performances as the first female M in the James Bond films, but what we're shown here is clearly a picture of the author in her early days--Liz is an overworked lower-echelon secret service operative, dealing with both the casual chauvinism of her colleagues and a potentially devastating terrorist plot.

The latter is handled with terrifying verisimilitude (one senses the author's intimate knowledge of this world here), and the chapters involving the activities of the 'invisible' (a terrorist who passes as a native of the host country) is probably the most chillingly handled section of the book.