Running from the Devil »

Jamie Freveletti is a trial lawyer and a runner. The author of the international bestseller Running from the Devil, she lives with her family in Chicago, Illinois.

A chemist for a cosmetics company and an ultramarathon runner, Emma Caldridge is en route from Miami to BogotÁ when her plane goes down in the mountains near the Venezuelan border. Thrown unhurt from the wreckage, she watches in horror as guerrillas drag the other passengers into the jungle. Stranded and alone in a deadly environment, Emma has no choice but to follow—and stumbles across Cameron Sumner, an injured government agent who was left behind to die.

As a Washington, D.C., task force races to the crash site in hopes of finding survivors, Emma and Cameron creep closer to a nightmare they may be powerless to prevent. But Emma is no ordinary woman—and she guards a secret both powerful and deadly that her adversaries would gleefully kill to possess.

And now she must run . . .

Publishers Weekly

At the start of Freveletti's less than impressive debut, a British Airways flight from Miami, Fla., to Bogotá carrying 30-year-old chemist Emma Caldridge crashes in the Colombian jungle. Armed men dressed in fatigues start taking the survivors hostage, but Caldridge manages to escape into the forest. A distress call from her cellphone reaches the U.S. government, which recently sent troops to Colombia to help guard an oil pipeline, as well as Darkview, a Blackwater-like outfit assisting the U.S. military with special ops around the world. Caldridge proves amazingly successful at dodging the bad guys, and even uses her professional training to derive digitalis from a plant for a fellow passenger who'll die without it. Cameron Sumner, a member of a drug agency who had special reasons for being on the BA flight, provides the requisite romantic interest. Some may cheer the author's larger-than-life heroine, but the clichéd action offers nothing thriller readers haven't encountered countless times before.A (May)

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