Homeland: Saul's Game: A Homeland Novel (Homeland Novels, 2)

Andrew Kaplan’s two books in the “Homeland” series are very good. They give us a lot of back story, and both Carrie and Saul’s characters are true to those created in the TV series.The first book was about Carrie and how she got started, how she comes to specialize in the Middle East and begins on the trail of Abu Nazir.This one is more about Saul -- his background, his troubled marriage with Mira, his professional relationship with Carrie and his nearly surreal spymaster capabilities.We are introduced to Nick Brody, the co-star of the first few seasons of “Homeland” on TV. We see how a long captivity has marked him, how he converts to Islam in a heartfelt manner, and how his loyalties to the U.S. waver as he develops a friendship with the child of his captor - Abu Nazir. He wonders what has happened to his family during six years of captivity, including a young son who doesn’t remember him, and a wife resentful that he joined the military after losing his job. And we hear about his depressingly awful childhood at the hands of a drunk and abusive father - a former Marine.The book gets into areas the TV series never did. Saul grows up as the only Jewish kid - and Orthodox - in a small town in Indiana, the child of Holocaust survivors. He couldn’t possibly be more an outsider. He is constantly looked upon as “Talmudic”. The book plays the Jewish angle more heavily with Saul than does the TV series (with the exception of the last series where Saul’s relationship with the Israelis comes into play as he’s about to become a fugitive.)We learn more about Dar Adal, Saul’s CIA colleague through much of the TV series. On TV he’s played as an American, but here we learn he’s Lebanese, an orphan to their civil war, and was adopted, and trained in the dark arts, by a major Palestinian terrorist. How he not only comes over to the American side, but rises in the CIA, isn’t made clear, and would bear explaining. Dar has a harder edge, and is more likely to see the need to kill someone now while Saul often takes a longer view and wants to hold off.It’s the spring of 2009. The story is about the hunt for Abu Nazir, but it winds around - Syria, Iraq, Iran, back to Iraq. It’s hard to keep the strands straight, just as it’s hard to keep the players straight in the real-world Middle East, with its dizzyingly complicated overlays of rival religions, governments, tribes, terror organizations and animosities, some recent and some dating back a thousand years.Carrie dodges death on multiple occasions, including at the hands of a sexy South African mercenary, head of a private security organization privy to high-level Western military intelligence, but suspected of leaking it to Iran or Al Qaeda or both. He and Carrie have the hots for each other - Ecstasy-fueled nights plus a threesome with his hot Ukrainian girlfriend - despite it becoming increasingly clear they’re maneuvering against each other. Carrie starts seeing the pattern of destruction that comes to men involved with her - the soldier Dempsey, killed in the first book, an Iraqi boyfriend about to divorce his wife for her, and now the mercenary DeBruin. Her world is so insane, she reflects, that being bipolar isn’t necessarily a problem.And she survives harrowing experiences both in Iran, where she is taken prisoner while working on a desperate gambit of Saul’s, and in Iraq, where she and a Sunni team try to stop a Sunni terrorist strike against a Shiite holy place which might start a civil war, just as the Americans are trying to pull out.

I love Homeland and I appreciate that this book and the previous one provide a fuller background to understanding Carrie and Saul and what drives them. And conversely, I got more out of the book because I watch Homeland and "know" Carrie and Saul. Even though the suspense was muted because we all know Carrie lives through these missions, it still had the suspense of "how will she get out of this one". Somehow I was not fully aware of how many times Carrie puts her life on the line, how close she comes to dying, and what she goes through because of her devotion to her job, or should I say, devotion to her calling. I wonder how many CIA officers are as smart and committed as Carrie.

As in the first volume, "Carrie's Run," there is a lot of helpful information for those Homeland fans who otherwise don't know very much about Carrie or Brody when they appeared in the very first episode. But unlike the first volume, the repetitive thematic meme of Carrie getting in well over her head and pulling it off or being rescued by Saul in the end is a bit worn by now. Not sure if this second book was really necessary or as informative as the first, but still a page turner that's I couldn't put down until the end.

If you liked the character development of the TV series DONT READ THESE BOOKS THEYRE WORSE THAN AWFUL they're total garbage. I put mine in the burn pile

Good book. Came in damaged and on time. Good read!

God I love this series. It can do no wrong.

Very exciting just like Homeland. Wish I would have read it before watching Homeland as it would have helped to make more sense of the beginning of the show.

An action driven thriller of Saul' s role pre-TV Homeland. An excellent story to backdrop the characters introduced on screen....however, the book just drops off at the end.....a bit of a let down. Also, a very good descriptive narrative of Saul and Carrie's relationship. Glad I read it. Also thought the glossary and outline if characters at end of book was an added bonus.Laurie Bumpus

Once again, Andrew Kaplan has delivered a story that depicts the characters exactly as we know them on screen, in another prequel to the events of season 1. Saul's Machiavellian ruthless streak that belies his outward liberal persona, runs riot in this convoluted tale of hunting down the elusive Abu Nazir andtrapping a government mole and rogue military contractor. The political and religious complications and alliances that dominate the middle east are once again woven into a convoluted tale of espionage intrigue. This is no LeCarre, but holds enough intellectual sophistication to satisfythe entertainment needs of the series fan and discerning reader alike. The action is solid and well described, however, I think 4stars this time, because I wasn't fully convinced by the outcome of a big scene toward the end of the story. That said, I thoroughly enjoyed the book and hope we see more.

I enjoyed Carrie's Run, the first of these books but this effort was hugely disappointing. The author tries to be too clever; for sure he knows a lot about the different tribes in Iraq and the inner tensions but the book bounces around in an incoherent fashion and it frankly just becomes too tiring to bother with. In the middle of all of this is a half decent but unimaginitive plot which the author tries to drag upwards by over complicating the surrounding narrative.This is a tiresome and tiring book and that is a shame as the first book by this author was a fairly good effort.

I was very disappointed by this sequel to Carrie's Run. Kaplan's first Homeland book was excellent. The characters in Carrie's Run acted and spoke consistently with what I'd come to expect from the tv series, the writing was deft, and I felt like I was learning new insights about the characters. His first book was like watching a new "episode" of Homeland, just delivered through the written medium. So I had high hopes for this sequel, Saul's Game.Unfortunately, my high hopes have been sorely disappointed. The difference in the two books is so stark it's almost as if someone else had written this book. The writing is sophomoric and awkward, there is no characterization to speak of, and no new insights into the characters beyond what we learned in Carrie's Run. But what really bothers me is what comes across as repeated stereotyping by the author -- of Muslims, of US government employees (as highly political cogs in the bureaucratic machine), and most of all, of Saul Berenson as a Jew. His religion is invoked repeatedly, not really to explain anything but simply to stereotype him (the sly Jew, the crafty Jew, the alienated Jew, and so on). Besides the harm that stereotypes do, it gave me the feeling that the author is using stereotypes to explain his characters' behavior rather than building situations and interactions that show us their inner motivations, something I would have much preferred.Overall, a very disappointing book, and far below the level of the first one.

This is the second Kaplan novel which ties in with the hugely successful series Homeland. The book surrounds Carrie on a mission to uncover a mole and touches upon Brody's incarceration under Abu Nazir and his subsequent feelings towards Nazir's son and the American administration. This for me was the better of the novels and was really tense at times. It really does lead up to the Tv series so well and is a must for any homeland fan.

A little hard to follow in places given the various Foriegn personalities involved and the convoluted plot but that doesn't distract from the enjoyment gained from following the daring-do exploits of Carrie as she attempts to blend (sometimes between the sheets) into the Middle Eastern conflict zones.