Present Danger - by Stella Rimington

This book was my next Book Club selection, for discussion at our meeting in April. I read it in one sitting - quite a long sitting, as I was on an aircraft for more than 11 hours. Here is the blurb:

When MI5 officer Liz Carlyle is posted to Northern Ireland, her heart sinks at the thought of working in a backwater. From the moment she arrives in Belfast danger follows and she soon discovers that the peace process in the province is precarious. Then a source reports strange activity at a house on the Irish Sea owned by The Fraternity, an organisation Liz suspects of being a front for renegade former IRA men. Its head is Seamus Piggott, an Irish-American with a gun-running past. Then another informant reports that a plot is being hatched against the security forces. Liz and her colleague Dave Armstrong suspect Piggott is involved, along with a former French Intelligence officer. Travelling to Paris, Liz pursues this connection with her counterpart in French Intelligence. While she is away, Dave Armstrong decides to take matter into his own hands. When Dave goes missing, Liz fears the worst, especially when she discovers that the obvious suspects have all also disappeared. The latest in Stella Rimington’s series of spy novels, Present Danger is a compulsive thriller filled with action and suspense.

Overall, I enjoyed the story, which was well structured and paced, with reasonably well drawn characters. In most respects it was exactly the kind of MI5 based thriller that one might expect from the author. I was unsurprised to find that the key character was female, but I was surprised that she was stereotypically so when it came to matters of the heart.

It is important to me that I have respect for a novel writer's integrity. Clearly the author is writing about a subject that she knows well, but a few details niggled. For example, there is a reference to the Arctic being a continent - I am sure it should have been Antarctica. Elsewhere there is a character who had belonged to an "extremist group" called the Weather Underground. Maybe this was a joke, as WE is a well known website, which is a community supported weather site.

However, I think that I am nit-picking and I would read another book by Stella Rimington if the opportunity arose.