Rip Tide (Liz Carlyle, #6) in Espionage Aficionados

Dec 25, 2011 Jeffrey rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: read-in-2011, espionage

Dry insightful espionage novel, the sixth in the Liz Carlyle series by Rimington. Not for those who want super hero espionage warriors who kill a terrorist a page, these British novels are set in an Anglocentric interpretation of the world and feature investigations, more of the nuances of tradecraft, the upending of terror cells through good old fashioned footwork and smarts.

Bloodshed is minimal, but Rimington knows her craft and her characters and they all are shown to good effect in this smar ...more

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Feb 19, 2019 Michael Martz rated it liked it

'Rip Tide' is a competently done spy novel starring Stella Rimington's MI5 agent Liz Carlyle. Rip Tide has a lot of the characteristics common to the Carlyle series: unspectacular writing, decent tradecraft, hint of romance, lots of commentary about looks and clothing, and a plot with a hole in it that essentially spoiled the whole thing for me.

It begins with the hijacking by Somali pirates of an aid ship heading to Africa. A French patrol boat intervenes and captures the pirates, among whom is 'Rip Tide' is a competently done spy novel starring Stella Rimington's MI5 agent Liz Carlyle. Rip Tide has a lot of the characteristics common to the Carlyle series: unspectacular writing, decent tradecraft, hint of romance, lots of commentary about looks and clothing, and a plot with a hole in it that essentially spoiled the whole thing for me.

It begins with the hijacking by Somali pirates of an aid ship heading to Africa. A French patrol boat intervenes and captures the pirates, among whom is a Brit of Pakistani descent. He has no good explanation on why he was with the Somalis, so they begin treating him as a possible terrorist. Carlyle is called in to interrogate him, gets nothing, but in the meantime it's discovered that British-Pakistani young men are leaving England for Pakistan and aren't returning by any official means. Are there terrorists being trained for a big attack? Some additional complications are that the pirates seem to be focused on one aid organization's shipments, but only on the most valuable of them, the aid org is based in Greece but is headed by an American who turns out to be ex-CIA, and the charity is staffed by a crew who have some pretty sketchy backgrounds. The investigators seem to think the pirates are getting a heads-up on which shipments to attack and also may be smuggling terrorists onto the African mainland. They set a trap which, in the end, sort of works...

Liz Carlyle is a good character, but the incessant internal conversations she has with herself over wardrobe, ex-boyfriends, current lover, who may or may not be interested in her, etc. are fairly annoying. Even more troubling in this novel was the (SPOILER ALERT) trap set to identify how the information about shipments was being leaked. A document was created and put in a desk that was locked with only 2 keys being in use: one held by the document creator, one by the guy in charge. The info, of course, gets out.... Now, wouldn't you think that one of the greatest, most technologically capable spy intelligence operations in the world would have something else monitoring that desk (like, for example, a hidden $40 video camera) so the young lady who created the document would not have to luck into finding out how (but not who) it was compromised?

Again, a decent novel with an unfortunate hole in the story, at least for me.....

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