Well done suspense featuring a female US Marshal. A creepy small town and lots of secrets add up to danger and a fast paced read.

When U.S. Marshal Helen Morrissey is ordered at the last minute to collect fugitive bank robber Rita Crawford from a remote town in the Sierra Nevadas, she braces for a rough trip. With a name like Kill Devil Falls, her destination turns out much worse than she could ever imagine. After barely surviving a white-knuckle drive in her sabotaged car, Helen arrives in a virtual ghost town populated by a bunch of weirdos and outcasts. The father and son enforcement team of Sheriff Big Red and Deputy Teddy Scoggins are used to doing things their way.

Things go wrong from the beginning when Rita tries to escape and is found dead in the woods with her throat cut. Helen realizes she is in big trouble and she spends a terrifying night trying to figure out who wants to help her and who wants to keep secrets buried forever. The body count continues to rise and Helen must use all her wits and ingenuity to survive.

I received an eARC via Netgalley and Midnight Ink with no requirements for a review. I voluntarily read this book and provided this review.

US Marshall Helen Morrissey is assigned to collect a bank robber from remote town but things don't go as normal. Firstly her car starts to go wrong as she navigates the mountain road to Kill Devil Falls which exists due to a non existent gold rush. As she reaches town things go from bad to worse and is forced to stay overnight due to car failure. What follows is a good story of the depths people will be driven too by greed. Can Helen survive the night and get out with her charge. This is a full on story with action from the start to finish, a little predictable in places but does not detract from the overall enjoyment. This is what happens when the rest of the world forgets that a places exists.

KILL DEVIL FALLS by Brian Klingborg tells the story of U.S. Marshal Helen Morrissey who goes to a place not even on the map named Kill Devil Falls to retrieve a fugitive named Rita who along with her partner Lee Larimer have pulled off a string of robberies and made off with a large sum over time.
Rita is a tough lady, and although showing the wear and tear of being on the run is still attractive to those in the small community where it is revealed she has hailed from.
Big Ed is the sheriff, and Teddy is the deputy at the makeshift jail at the time Helen arrives.
Teddy tells Helen that Big Ed is out on a call for a reported shooting at a nearby community.
Helen completes the necessary forms to take custody of Rita only to discover that her car will not start, and from there things start to go off the rails.
Brian Klingborg has written what appears to be his first published novel, and I was a little concerned at first when Helen the lead character is driving and listening to self-help tapes with a strong feminist view pushing anti-male sentiments, but she scoffs at some of the things said on the tapes.
Male characters come off as stupid, weak, cruel, perverted, etc. which seemed a little one dimensional, but right from the start the action and storyline were solid and I stayed with it until I realized basically it was pretty much Helen alone against the entire small community with no ability to travel or make contact with anyone outside of Kill Devil Falls. Helen has to overcome almost impossible obstacles just to survive, and her priorities change constantly as she faces danger from all directions.
Kill Devil Falls is a strong first novel for author Brian Klingborg, and it is an action packed story with a lot of twists and turns along the way making it easy to maintain interest as things get more and more out of control throughout the book.
4 stars.

This is the kind of story where one person faces multiple attempts on her life in a very short period of time, attempting to beat off all of her adversaries. That person is U.S. Marshall, Helen Morrissey. She's been sent to the remote Sierra Nevadan mountain town of Kill Devil Falls, a virtual ghost town, to pick up a prisoner. There are very few residents of this town, which is riddled with sink holes caused by the gold mines under the mountains. Those few remaining residents have uniquely oddball reasons for being there, and none of them are good (neither the people nor the reasons).

The prisoner is only the first to die, as Helen fights off an ever dwindling number of residents as they try numerous means of killing her. There's not much time for characterization, although each of the nasty characters is nasty in his or her own way. Helen is a bad ass tough cop, and that's about all the characterization we get for her.

However, the strength of this book (beyond its non-stop plot, if that appeals), is the description of the setting. Kill Devil Falls is a rural, poisoned and condemned town, surrounded and undermined by holes in the ground put there by desperate men hoping to find riches of gold. In the midst of the mayhem, Klingborg describes the town so well that the reader feels as though they've just come back from a visit to the deserted town. It's not a particularly pleasant place to visit, but at least we got there before it disappeared completely.

Helen is a US Marshall and she's been sent to pick up a fugitive. While in route, she gets a call that tells her she has a new destination. It's a small jail in Kill Devil Falls. When she arrives, she finds it's a ghost town with very few residents. She also knows someone sabotaged her tire at the restaurant she stopped at. The only thing she can figure is that it must have been her fugitive's boyfriend. So she's on the watch for him. She should be on the watch for the town residents...

Midnight Ink and Net Galley allowed me to read this book for review (thank you). It will be published April 8th.

Everybody in town is strange and a bit crazy, as well as dangerous. She intends to grab her fugitive and get back on the road, but her car won't start. So now she has to sit and wait for the sheriff.

In the meantime, the lights go out and she has to visit the odd guys in the trailer who do jobs around town. They also grow pot. While she's doing that, the prisoner gets away and someone cut her throat. That's just the beginning of trouble...

Everybody is trying to kill her. They don't want their secrets to go public. As people start dropping like flies, she's trying to piece together what they were doing and who's killing who. There's a lot of tension in this story. Adrenaline only lasts so long. She loses her gun along the way. They run through mining tunnels. It'll wear you out before you get to the end.

I liked the way the author ended it. It was the best way for it all to come out. You won't be bored if you read this one.

Kill Devil Falls isn’t somewhere you’d want to end up stranded. A ruined wreck of rust belt Americana in the Sierra Nevada region, it has no main road. No mains power. No cellphone signal. It has an incompetent, possibly corrupt local police force. It has a single criminal incarcerated in its ramshackle jailhouse. It has many more freaks, weirdos, oddballs and outcasts crawling around its dilapidated old houses and decaying trailers.
The life went out of Kill Devil Falls years ago, when the mining stopped, when its water supply was contaminated and the sink holes started swallowing up the real estate. Kill Devil Falls is a hellhole, a ghost town, and only the faintest embers of its soul are still flickering.
Into this situation strides US Marshall Helen, come to transport white-trash Rita from the jailhouse to county court after Rita and her beau ripped up the road in a series of highway robberies. Somehow Rita got herself tagged while skulking around Kill Devil Falls. But before Helen can cuff her securely in the back seat of the prowler and head back down the snowy mountains, her car’s incapacitated – and then people start dying. Helen’s on her own against unknown perp/s who want to steal Rita’s swag and keep their own sordid secrets securely under wraps…
In no time flat, KDF becomes a die-by-the-numbers hunt-n-hide. Peripheral characters come and go in grisly cameos. Author Klingborg plays it smart with his in-bred backwoods cast of creeps, so you’re never quite sure who might be a real deviant psycho killer, and who’s just opportunistic scum with an eye on the main chance (or Helen’s ass. Or both). They’re all equally threatening.
Helen herself doesn’t get much in the way of character development; think Scully in one of the later X-Files episodes when she’s isolated in hillbilly country. Helen’s role is to run away, fight back, be plucky, make some dumb moves and uncover the true evil in the town.
Kill Devil Falls relies on breathless continual motion to maintain its momentum and sense of tension. It’s not one of those dark, brooding backwoods noir novels which oozes nerve-shredding atmosphere. There are some gruesome moments, and some well-choreographed action sequences, but we’re a long way from Clarice Starling and psychological thrillers of that ilk.
A fast-paced read, easy to get into but kinda like a grande cappuccino: mostly froth.
7/10

(Lengthened review to come shortly... Stay tuned...)

U.S. Marshal Helen Morrissey travels to tiny, remote Kill Devil Falls in the Sierra Nevada mountains to transport a prisoner. Rita Crawford and her boyfriend, Lee Larimer. Robbed credit unions and convenience stores across Southern California. Then, she took the loot and left him high and dry. Rita is in jail in Kill Devil Falls. Larimer is on the hunt. Not many people will survive.