Customer Reviews

The Unit: Lock and Load (Unit (Signet))

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Unit, a secret task force inside the US military, is sent to Israel to bring a defector from an Islamic terrorist group back to the US. Unknown to the team, they are being set up by members of the CIA who dislike the competition. They promise Israel's secret service that the Unit will give the defector to them and the misunderstanding leads to a shootout and the Unit having to go on the run through Israel and the Gaza Strip. A prime target for several terrorist groups as well as the Israelis, the Unit's chances of making it out of Israel alive and with their reputation intact are slim.

This book is okay if you don't know the series it's based on and just want a good military story. But then that's not really the audience this book is meant for. As a fan of the series I was very disappointed for the following reasons:
- The characters are in many instances not behaving as they do in the series. Jonas, the team leader, keeps nagging, trying to spread panic and making his team nervous. Carlito is on watch, knowing how dangerous the situation is, and spends the time flirting and kissing a woman they took along. You get the idea.
- I would estimate that more than half of the book isn't even about the Unit but about the characters the author invented himself. Since he doesn't seem to have bothered to become well aquainted with the series I'm not surprised. I must say that those characters are actually well-developed, but then I'm buying a Unit book for the Unit and would like to see a lot more of them than is the case here.
- The women of the Unit don't play a role at all even though the series episodes take their lives as seriously as those of the men.
- Several ideas were simply taken from series episodes, in particular the CIA plot and Carlito's affair with a woman from Israel (though she was a Jew, not a Muslim). That's not very interesting.
All in all, this is not a good tie-in to the series and I wouldn't recommend buying it.

If you want to read a story that is like the TV series, this is not it.
Yes the names are the same, but none of the "home life" is to be found, as it is a straight mission story.
Now then, read the story and absorb the fine details, the how and why, things are done in the field and look
at the way things play out in the Middle East, Americans don't understand the culture of the people over there
and we had better learn fast, as the old saying goes, know your enemy, as well as you know yourself.
Enjoy the book and I hope more stories in this series follow.

For those that like the show "The Unit" these are great books. The storyline belongs nowhere in the TV show story. I like that the family dynamics you see in the show are missing from the book. Now that the show is over, I hope more of these books come out.

Haven't read it yet, been reading something else, but according to
what it says on the back of the book, I know I'll enjoy it.