Jamie Freveletti’s latest thriller, Blood Run, accompanies chemist Emma Caldridge on her humanitarian mission with the billionaire Jackson Rand, delivering vaccines to African villages. However, after only a few weeks, Caldridge, Rand, and his secretary are ambushed by a group of trained assassins. The more she discovers about the underlying motives behind their humanitarian efforts, the more she realizes just how precarious their situation really is. Before she knows it, she is leading a rag tag group of hostages and freed slaves through the Sahara Desert in a desperate attempt to keep a deadly toxin from falling into the hands of the terrorists and insurgents hunting them.
It goes without saying that this is not a book rooted in our everyday lives—I’d describe it as a literary equivalent to a Mission Impossible film. The story is equal parts danger and humor, full of exploding helicopters and double crosses with just a hint of romance to tie it all together. There’s no deeper story to be intuited, nor are there meaningful ideas about life being implied. It’s fanciful and far fetched—and that’s why I had such a good time reading it. Far too many things in this day and age are taken so seriously, but Blood Run chronicles the adventures of a badass chemist-turned-special-agent fighting off the bad guys and saving the day in the middle of an African sandstorm. It doesn’t pretend to be anything more than some good fun and an adrenaline rush—nor should it.
And all of that is not to say that this novel isn’t extremely well-written. The story snatches you up and whips you along at a breakneck pace. The writing style cuts straight to the point, with no convoluted plot twists to slow it down. It was a straightforward, easy read—the perfect novel to escape reality for a few hours and live as the kind of bold, heroic woman I always thought I’d grow up to be. Freveletti does a great job of immersing you in the story without making you struggle through a veritable thesaurus to get there.
Bearing in mind that I have a soft spot for any story where women step up to save the day amidst their floundering male counterparts, I’d rank this pretty high on my list of favorite thriller novels. I had a blast reading Blood Run and would strongly recommend it to fans of thrillers and spy flicks alike. (I might also be nipping out to pick up another one of Emma Caldridge’s adventures).
Blood Run will be released on November 14, 2017.
