Liz Carlyle, Stella Rimington's fictional MI5 officer, is a bit of a puzzle to fans of sleuthing, spookery and old-fashioned cloak and dagger. The trouble, to begin with anyhow, is that in Secret Asset, 'the second Liz Carlyle novel' (Hutchinson, £12.99), inference and deduction are decidedly lowbrow skills. We can tell this right away from the information on the dustjacket: 'Liz Carlyle learns from one of her agents that suspicious meetings have been taking place at an Islamic bookshop. She feels instinctively that a terrorist cell is at work.'

LRB 3 August 2006 | PDF Download