Reviewed by Annika and Jen B.

TITLE: Soul on Fire

AUTHOR: Tal Bauer

PUBLISHER: Self-Published

LENGTH: 280 Pages

RELEASE DATE: July 27, 2019

BLURB: 

A deadly virus burns through the jungle, leaving nothing but corpses in its wake. Everyone flees from the outbreak—except for the terrorists intent on weaponizing the catastrophe.

Lieutenant Elliot Davis, US Navy SEAL, is sent to rescue CIA officers from their clandestine base in Goma, the Democratic Republic of Congo, and evacuate them out of the country. What they’ve uncovered sends Elliot back to the Congo, trying to prevent an attack that could spark a global pandemic.

Dr. Ikolo Ngondu runs a refugee hospital caught between the advancing rebels intent on slaughtering everyone in their path and Elliot’s mission to find and capture their leader. In the chaos of a surprise attack, Elliot’s target slips away, and the only way to find him is to plunge into the Congo’s dark, dangerous, and fevered forest with Ikolo as his guide.

Together they track a burning shadow through Africa’s broken heart, and Elliot struggles to reconcile the world he finds with the life he’s lived as a black man in the West. He looks to Ikolo for answers and finds a man with a core so bright and fierce he scorches Elliot’s soul.

Even as they race against time, Elliot and Ikolo have no idea what’s been set in motion with their mission: a dark secret lies at the center, one that leaves billions of lives hovering between life and death.

And through it all, a question burns inside Elliot, one that only Ikolo may hold the answer to.

Tal Bauer sure knows how to paint a picture with words. And Soul on Fire is a gruesome picture at that. This time he takes us deep into the African jungle where wars are being fought on several fronts; Ebola is spreading through the country leaving dead villages in its wake, rebels are fighting for power and killing off anything and everyone standing in their way. Then there are the foreign powers, aid workers, UN and the spies alike spread out for different reasons. To say that the situation is precarious and dangerous is putting it mildly.

We saw this war, or rather wars being fought from so many sides, from so many point of views. From the doctor fighting to keep refugees alive, treating everything from stitching wounds to cancer and Ebola. Burying children that didn’t make it. We follow the US Navy SEAL tasked with finding and apprehending a dangerous rebel before causing even more death and destruction. And last but not least there are the rebels and their cause, and even the Chinese play a role in this. To say the least, Soul on Fire is as intricate a story that Bauer is known to create.

When I reached about 25 percent of the book I was still questioning who the main characters were – yes I’m still guilty of not reading the blurb, I just saw Bauer’s name and needed to read this story. Anyway, I was wondering about the MCs, and I was definitely wondering if there was going to be a love interest in there. Around halfway through, I had my answers to my first two questions, but found something new to ponder. I wasn’t sure where I wanted this story to go. I mean the fight being fought was so much bigger than these two men. Yet at the same time those two deserved every moment of happiness they could get. In the end though I think Bauer handled it with aplomb.

Reading this book makes you, or at least me, ask some tough questions. How far and how much are we willing to sacrifice to save innocent lives? And how can you prioritise one life over another – what life is more important? Do you chose to help the girl in a village no one has ever heard of, that might just decimate all of it or go after the big bad? Do you take out a town overrun by an infectious disease (killing innocents) in hopes to keep the decease from spreading to millions more? These are scary questions, but what’s even scarier is that somewhere in the world those questions are asked, and someone will answer them. There are no winners in war, only loss.

Soul on Fire is a story that will touch you in one way or another. It’s raw and honest and real. So, so real. It will open your eyes, make you bleed in the best and worst ways. And for the life of me I can’t understand how Bauer managed to write and publish this story in less than a month, because the level of details in this book is truly astounding.

I’m a huge fan of Tal’s writing, so I grabbed this one without really thinking too much about it. This turned out to be exactly what I expected from him, yet totally different at the same time. I generally feel as though I’m reading a John Grishamesque story with the added bonus of gay characters. This time around, things went off in another direction and another country altogether. We have military special forces on a mission to thwart a potential bioterrorism attack originating in the Congo. It starts out slow giving the gruesome background of not only the Ebola virus but the plight of the indigenous people.

As I said, the beginning is a little slow, but it picks up when you realize who the potential couple is and the adventure, if you can call it that, that they must undertake together. What a conundrum Mr. Bauer puts us in wanting to care about the couple and see them find a way to be together, while the sole purposes of the story, getting to the bottom of who the players are and preventing them from succeeding. That seemed to be the main theme here. Do you help those in the immediate path or bypass them to prevent the greater fallout.

I found this to be rather depressing most of the time – but, at the same time, I felt I had to hear the struggles of these people. There are definitely a lot of really evil people in this world. Further, if you have a weak stomach, this might be touchy for you. The symptoms and fallout of the Ebola virus are described in detail and not good in any sense. I hope Mr. Bauer took some major leeway with this part, although given his penchant for researching his stories, I’m not very hopeful. To that end, I heard this was written in a month. That just doesn’t even seem possible given the quality of the writing, the depth of the research that must have been involved, etc. Needless to say, it didn’t take long for me to be engrossed and turning pages to find out what happened. This story ends on a pretty happy note, so I’ll let you know that it is definitely worth the heartache to get there. Due to the slow beginning and a little bit of a preachy/political soapbox (i.e. black men can’t succeed, yet that same main character is a decorated Navy SEAL; the USA is evil, yet we are the ones trying to help though it is never enough, etc.) feel every now and then, I had to drop a half star, but if you’ve not read this author before, I highly recommend you do so. The books are well thought out, well written and have a very thorough and polished feel to them.

RATING: