Set Free by Anthony Bidulka
Published: 8/19/16
Page Count: 284
My Rating: 5/5
Disclaimer: This book was given to me by the author in exchange for an honest review.
Summary (from Goodreads):
The truth will set you free. Can lies do the same?
Within minutes of arriving in the exotic, enigmatic, sweltering city of Marrakech, renowned author Jaspar Wills is kidnapped, blindfolded, bound, and beaten. As Wills struggles to survive the ordeal, he recounts his rise to fame and the tragic events that led him to Morocco. With the kidnapper’s demands left unmet, Wills faces death with fear, grief…and guilt. Is what happened in the past tied to his abduction? Is someone he loves responsible? Or is this payback for his sins? Living with a loss far greater than his own death, Jaspar yearns to be set free. But do some kinds of freedom come at too high a cost?
Six months later, struggling reporter Katie Edwards travels to Morocco to stake her claim on the story with everything—international intrigue, mystery, celebrity, violence, sex, heartbreak, betrayal. Once there, she discovers a shocking truth. As the young journalist’s career soars, Jaspar Wills’ is destroyed…until an act of revenge leads to a stunning revelation that will change everything.
My Review:
“I would have packed less if I knew I was going to die.”
No, that is not a spoiler, so you can put down your pitchfork. In fact, that is actually the very first sentence on page one of chapter one in the voice of Jaspar Wills, the narrator/semi-famous author who gets caught up in what is quite possibly the worst year-or-so of his life.
Reflecting back, I was ignorant to the depth of crippling loss and tumultuous treachery that I was about to spiral into as I looked upon the cover of this novel. Bidulka effectively portrays his characters in an almost scarily realistic light, making me feel as though I were a character in the book looking in on a friend’s situation. I found myself wishing I were able to console, to protect, to help, to do anything for these people. My entire attention and full height of my emotions was so focused into this novel that I remember feeling the physical effects of reading it as the final pages approached—the long-held breaths, the contorted expressions of confusion and shock, the rising body temperature. But why? The plot is simple: man takes a trip to another country and gets kidnapped. It sounds like it would make for a decent story, but nothing tremendously interesting; and that’s where Bidulka proves such an assumption pathetically wrong. Throughout the novel, he takes a seemingly bland skeleton of a storyline and adds the veins, muscles, meat, and skin in a thrilling, deep way that catches the reader off guard. I am confident in saying that, if you think you know what’s going to happen/who did what, you’re wrong in at least ten ways.
Truth be told, after finishing the last page of this book, I stared at the final word and audibly whispered “Wow” out of astonishment. If I have ever read the literary equivalent of a tornado, an earthquake, and a tsunami all wrapped in one superstorm of personal betrayal, shocking twists, and gut-wrenching emotion, it would be Set Free by Anthony Bidulka. I can’t even count the number of times my eyebrows furrowed in confusion so as to ask “What in the world just happened?” Whenever I picked up this book, I just did not want to stop reading it. More often than not, I ended up extending my planned twenty-minute reading periods into hours just to see what happens next. There was never a dull moment, and that is thanks to the novel’s fast pace and alluring writing style.
The bread and butter of Anthony Bidulka’s novel is not just the sinister story of the main character’s abduction, torture, and solitude, but it is the twisted intertwining of that account with an even more ominous, even more painful sequence of events overshadowing the entire story; such a dark combination is what truly gives this book its addictive, shocking essence.
After reading Set Free, I have learned that the truth may not always set you free and that trust is deadlier than it may seem.
View all my GoodReads reviews.
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