Plotters

Journalist Lizzie Dearden has been covering terrorism and extremism for about a decade. In her first book, Plotters, she looks at a series of botched terrorist attacks in the UK between 2017 and 2022, examining the attackers’ motivations and the reasons they failed. Sometimes it was down to luck: one would-be perpetrator got waylaid by a malfunctioning satnav; another mistakenly equipped his homemade bomb with acetone-free nail polish remover instead of the regular stuff, rendering it harmless. Often it was a matter of an…