Devil may care

Nine years ago, Jamie Freveletti crewed for an ultramarathon runner, trekking through a 100-mile race in the woods. When snow hit, the runner fell to the side of the road, and hypothermia overtook him.

“It was disastrous,” says Freveletti, on the phone from her Lincoln Park home. “There was a freak snowstorm, and then all of a sudden I was sitting in the ER with him, and he couldn’t even think, couldn’t say his name.”

Such a brush with catastrophe is the kind of thing that sets a novelist’s mind racing. The trouble was, at the time, Freveletti wasn’t a novelist. A lawyer specializing in cases involving pharmaceutical companies, she hadn’t yet made the transition from litigator to author. But the notion of a trained endurance athlete suddenly at a loss stuck with her.

“I thought, I’m going to try this,” she says. “I wanted to put a protagonist in a place with no compass, no sense of orientation.”

After reading a story about a hijacking in Colombia, in which a politician’s plane was brought down and the pol disappeared into the jungle, Freveletti found the missing piece for her debut novel, Running from the Devil (William Morrow, $24.99). In it, Emma Caldridge, a chemist for a perfume company and an ultramarathoner, takes a flight to Colombia to research a plant. Somewhere in the mountains, hijackers bring the plane down, and a paramilitary group rounds up the survivors and marches them deep into the contested, mine-riddled wilderness. The wreck, however, catapults Caldridge away from the fray, and she scampers into the woods before the hijackers see her. As captives and captors hack their way through the thicket, Caldridge follows their trail, leaving traces for potential rescuers.

Caldridge’s story splits time with the Department of Defense back in Washington, mired in a bureaucratic muddle, unsure of how to proceed in a politically charged South American country. Edward Banner (the names are perfect for a novel that—and we mean this as a compliment—reads like a lost episode of The A-Team) runs a private security contractor called Darkview, which lands the rescue gig. After all of the stories about Blackwater working as contractors—some would say mercenaries—in the Iraq War, it’s a little strange to see an organization patterned after an infamous organization function as the good guys.

Freveletti classifies her debut as an “action-adventure story,” less reliant on twists than momentum. Though the writing could have used a stronger editor for a first-time novelist (When the plane goes down, “They hit the ground with a huge bang.”), the pacing makes for a fun summer page-turner. And Freveletti just turned in a second manuscript to her editor. Some of the characters will reappear, she says, because she’s found her niche.

“I looked and couldn’t find a female writer who’s done a balls-out action thriller with a female protagonist,” she says. “There’s nothing, except Lara Croft: Tomb Raider.”

Running from the Devil hits stores this week.

Buy Running from the Devil on Amazon.com

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