Nowhere to Run

"To all those young women out there who think they’ve found ‘Mr Right’:

You may well be dancing with the devil..."

To all appearances, Hazel Valerie Jackson lived a gilded young life quite becoming of a privileged, middle-class upbringing.
A bright and vivacious child, she was, on the surface, a ‘daddy’s girl’. But all was not as it seemed, and the grammar-school-educated daughter of a wealthy businessman was in fact a prisoner of her parents’ quiet tyranny.
In her early 20s, at the height of the rock ‘n’ roll boom in northern England, Val thought she had put all that behind her when she met the man of her dreams.
Jim Olan Bumbard, a quiet American working on the oil rigs on the North Sea coast, was the epitome of smooth, southern charm and impeccable manners.
But appearances can deceive and when Val plunged headlong into a whirlwind romance with a consummate fraudster, she knew nothing about her husband-to-be’s murky past.
Hopelessly in love, she moved to America to start a new life with the man on whom she had pinned all her hopes.
But her dreams of a life of quiet, southern gentility were soon crushed when the man she thought could do no wrong turned into the devil incarnate. It was the biggest mistake of her young life, but the trap was already set.
Stuck in Hicksville where segregation was a way of life and casual racism the norm, Val’s hellish experience in the Deep South was every woman’s worst nightmare, but there was nowhere to run and seemingly nowhere to hide.
A brutally candid account of one woman’s struggle to escape the clutches of a violent husband and a state mired in the horrors of racial intolerance, Nowhere to Run is a salutary lesson in how blind love can lead to the most disastrous of consequences…