Rating: 
Summary: Pual saves this one for Demille
Review: Since publishing The General's Daughter neither Plum Island or The Lions Game are even close to Word of Honor, The Charm School and The Gold Coast. Up Country is saved by the sardonic wit and humor of CID agent Paul Brenner. If you like this character or are buying all Demille's books, go ahead. If you're really interested in perhaps what Vietnam is like today, go ahead. If not, save your money for his next book!
Rating: 
Summary: A good book but a great history lesson
Review: This story takes you along with Paul Brenner as he retraces his steps through two tours of Viet Nam. He gives you an insight from his war memories and lets you feel the country twenty five years later. For those of us raised during this God-awful time, it was a great explanation of what really went on between the news clips we saw on TV. The story was good but the history was exceptional.
Rating:
Summary: Worth the Ride!
Review: DeMille has come back strong with his sequel to " The General's Daughter." This exploration of Vietman decades after the war combines humor, intrigue and pathos to provide DeMille's fans with this best book in a long time. Okay, there is some hokey stuff and improbable situations, but DeMille's journey back to Vietman is worth the ride.
Rating:
Summary: Suspenseful Journey Across Vietnam
Review: Vietnam veteran and author Nelson DeMille reacquaints his readers with Paul Brenner, former CID investigator and primary character of THE GENERAL'S DAUGHTER. The year is 1997, and his former boss, Colonel Karl Hellmann, asks Brenner, who completed two tours in Vietnam, to investigate a thirty-year-old crime that occurred there. Allegedly, in February of 1968, a U.S. Army captain shot a U.S. Army lieutenant and killed him. The only witness was a soldier for the North Vietnamese army, named Tran Van Vinh. In a letter to his brother, Tran Quan Lee, Tran Van Vinh describes the occasion. An American soldier discovered the letter on the body of Tran Quan Lee and recently unearthed it in an old trunk and sent it along to Vietnam Veteran's of America. Paul's mission is to locate Mr. Tran Van Vinh and discover if he remembers the murderous incident. Reluctantly agreeing to this mission, Paul flies to Saigon where he meets up with American Susan Weber who claims to be making contact with him to aid a friend. Susan's savvy knowledge of Vietnam helps Paul as he journeys across the countryside, ostensibly as a vet and tourist reliving old memories. As an airport confrontation with Colonel Mang leaves a cloud of suspicion over Paul, Susan's relationship with Paul aids his attempt to lessen Mang's suspicion. Paul's reawakening journey across Vietnam is not a history lesson, but a craftily worded journey that leaves the reader grasping for more in anticipation of the next clash with police and finally, the discovery of Tran Van Vinh. Seasoned veteran Brenner is fully aware that there is more to this mission than meets the eye, but what, he has yet to discover. And Susan proves to be an enigma, as her abilities to squirm out of the most difficult of situations, are inconsistent with her status as an ivy-league American businesswoman. As Paul and Susan approach Tran Van Vinh's village near the Tet holiday, they must decide whether love and trust are codependent. With seven hundred plus pages of text, many a reader might be concerned that the description of places and battles in Vietnam would cause the read to drag. Not so, as De Mille is a skilled enough author to carefully integrate the present and past in a combination that encourages the reader to seek the compelling conclusion.
Rating: 
Summary: On drugs
Review: Unfortunately, I have to give a star rating to this addendum, wildly skewing the curve unless another hundred of you jump in with reviews of your own. After posting my comments, I noticed that the American hardback edition is 576 pages. The large-format British paperback edition, same cover, that I read is 654 pages. So the 50 pages of that edition that I said was devoted to plot would be 44 pages in the hardback copy. I knew you'd want to know. On another subject, have you read the two lines of commentary on "Up Country" from the Library Journal under the Editorial Reviews link? To quote in its entirety: "In DeMille's latest, Paul Brenner is drug back into the army's Criminal Investigative Division to check out a murder committed 30 years ago in Vietnam. People probably won't have to be drug into the theaters to see the film version, due out from Paramount with John Travolta possibly reprising the role of Paul Brenner, whom he played in The General's Daughter." I know America has a drug problem, but have I been away so long that the word has replaced "dragged"? Perhaps it was just an error -- you would have to be on drugs to use it twice in two sentences.
Rating:
Summary: great thriller
Review: After years as an Army Criminal Investigation Officer, Paul Brenner was forced to retire. His former boss Colonel Karl Hellmann asks Paul to meet him at the Vietnam War Memorial. Karl explains to Paul that an American may have murdered a person listed on the Wall. In 1968, a North Viet Namese soldier Tran Van Vinh witnessed an American captain killing an American lieutenant. Tran sent a letter in 1968 claiming what he saw. This letter has just reached the Criminal Investigation Division. Karl wants Paul to go to Nam to determine if Tran still lives and can identify the killer.
Paul wants no part of Nam having served two tours there, but reluctantly agrees to travel as a tourist though he believes there is more to the case than a three plus decade old homicide. In Nam, Paul meets Susan Weber, who serves as his translator. Besides the personal nightmares that Paul relives on his journey, he becomes entangled in a murder mystery shrouded inside espionage that reaches into the highest levels of both nations.
UP COUNTRY is a great thriller that plays out on several levels with each interesting and all tying back to the prime theme of the soul "going home". On the surface the tale is a cleverly designed mystery with spy and political implications, but it is much more than that. The novel is a character study that provides a look inside a person proving you can go home even if it is never quite the same. Nelson DeMille's tale is bound to make everyone's short list for best book of the year unless 2002 proves to be the equivalent 1939 cinema. Harriet Klausner
Rating:
Summary: Superbly entertaining and thought-provoking...
Review: I listened to the unabridged version of this book - At 20+ hours I thought it would take a couple of weeks - Big mistake! -
Character development, geographical descriptions, historical significance, kept me listening hour after hour, and I finished in less than 3 days - Please, Mr DeMille, let's have one more Paul Brenner novel, and don't forget Susan Weber, a worthwhile accomplice in almost any situation...
Rating: 
Summary: Unedited autobiographical novel that I couldn't finish
Review: What IS it with this author and me?? I couldn't finish Word of Honour (didn't care what happened to the main characters), couldn't finish Spencerville, after having read 80% of it (same problem), and now I've quit Up Country after getting over 700 pages through it. To be fair, I should state I finished, and enjoyed, Mayday and The General's Daughter. I was prepared to like Up Country. DeMille and I are in the same generation and although I wasn't in Vietnam, I was in the Navy for 5 years during the Vietnam War. It was my generation's war. Anyway, I was hopeful. But do we need 859 pages of DeMille's cathartic writing about the war? I don't. Yes, writing is cathartic, and of course writers can feel that a book is inside them and needs to get out. I understand all that. But barely-camouflaged autobiography is pushing it. I would have preferred DeMille to write a non-fiction account of his miltary experience in-country, and then an account of his return. There is just something about DeMille's writing, perhaps the glacial pace, that I can't abide. "Get on with it!", I keep thinking. And DeMille apparently has only one kind of male character, the smart-mouth type. This typical DeMillian guy disobeys my first rule of travel, and it's especially egregious because of his secret mission: DeMille gives a lot of grief to people who have power over him, in this case the local Vietnamese officials. Not very bright for a CID agent. And his sweet and sour relationship with the heart throb-de-tome isn't very convincing either. So...my advice would be to find DeMille books on ABRIDGED audio if you must read him.
Rating: 
Summary: DeMille is excellent - but not this time
Review: Nelson Demille is, by far, my favourite author and a writer of substantial quality. All of his books are of the highest quality and a pleasure to read and re-read. Up Country is however, the only exception. Being many many pages in length it is certainly an interesting insight into the '68 Tet Offensive however it is lacking any worthy plot. The novel unfortunately reads as more of a set of war memoirs although I am pleased that Nelson has 'got this off his chest'! I even flew to the Vero Beach book centre to meet Nelson and for him to sign my copy so it's a shame I'm unlikely to read this novel again. An interesting read, but not a classic.
Rating:
Summary: A
Review: I can understand Mr, DeMilles need to work with his own Vietnam traumas, but why share it with us?. Maybe other Vietnam veterans might like it, but as a Dane never been in Vietnam, I dont like it.
The story is not one of the best and the characters not really believable, the plot was not convincing at all. The book might be usefull as a tourist guide or history book, but as a novel it was a big disappointment. I like the other novels by DeMills, but really not this.
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