Amazon.com Review
The woman who formerly headed Britain's intelligence service (and what would Ian Fleming have made of that?) comes in from the cold with a smart, clever, and brilliantly paced thriller that seems ripped from the headlines--if not today's, then probably tomorrow's. Liz Carlyle is an agent-runner in MI-5's Joint Counter-Terrorist Group, which is facing the ultimate intelligence nightmare; an "invisible," a terrorist who's an ethnic native of the target country and thus able to cross its borders unchecked and move around its environs unquestioned. All Liz and her team have to go on is the suspicion that a local fisherman who was shot with an unusual armor-piercing gun known to be favored by foreign agents and whose body was found in the restroom of a transport café near a smuggler's beach may have been involved in helping an undercover operative known as "Vengeance Before God" enter England without benefit of passport or visa--a man whose mission, if not his identity, has been the subject of recent intelligence "chatter" from militant Muslim sources. And while Liz thinks she knows who the operative is--an Afghani with forged papers last seen in a German port city--she doesn't have a clue about the "invisible" who's helping him, or the target in their crosshairs.

This is a tightly drawn, expertly told tale that wastes few words in describing the shadowy world of the intelligence services, the turf battles and infighting, and even the romantic entanglements that attend the lives of those involved. It marks a promising second career for its author, whose future success will doubtless be much more public than her earlier accomplishments. --Jane Adams