Dame Stella Rimington joined the Security Service (MI5) in 1968. During her career she worked in all the main fields of the Service: counter-subversion, counter-espionage and counter-terrorism. She was appointed Director General in 1992, the first woman to hold the post. She has written her autobiography and several Liz Carlyle novels. She lives in London and Norfolk.

'Rimington tells her story with the crisp authority one would expect of James Bond's M' New York Times Book Review

Recovering from a gruelling terrorist investigation, Liz Carlyle has been posted to MI5's counter-espionage desk. Her bosses hope the change of scene will give her some breathing space, but they haven't counted on Putin's increased aggression towards the West. Soon Liz is on the hunt for a Russian spy who threatens to plunge Britain back into the fraught days of the Cold War.

Meanwhile, MI6 has hired Jasminder Kapoor, a controversial young civil rights lawyer, to explain issues of privacy and security to the public. But in this world of shadowy motives and secret identities, Jasminder must be extra-careful about whom she can trust .

She bids to join the ranks of such secret-agent authors as Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene and John le Carré

A wealth of persuasive detail, obviously drawn from first-hand experience

This is something rare: the spy novel that prizes authenticity over fabrication that is true to the character and spirit of intelligence work

For a pacy page-turner, she's a safe bet . . . Rimington is particularly strong in her accounts of procedure, unsurprisingly, given her past role as Head of MI5

Faster than Le Carré, she creates the same sense of real characters struggling with real problems

Liz Carlyle is an MI5 agent with the traditional thriller-heroine mix of dysfunctional personal life and steely ambition

Just like her heroine Liz, Stella Rimington was a woman in a mainly man's world as the head of MI5 and this lends her novel enormous credibility right through to the nail-biting final

This spy story is as authentic as it could be . Although high drama is tightly limited, there is enough action (and sympathy for targeted agents) to make for a highly satisfying plot