Road Closed: A Detective Geraldine Steel Mystery

By Leigh Russell

When a man dies in a gas explosion, the police suspect arson. The Murder Investigation Team is called in to examine the evidence, but the case takes on a new and terrible twist when a local villain is viciously attacked.

As the police inquiries lead from an expensive Harchester Hill estate to the local brothel, a witness dies in a hit-and-run. Was it coincidence … or cold-blooded murder? The Murder Investigation Team has problems of its own—and so does Geraldine Steel. A shocking revelation threatens her peace of mind as the investigation races toward its dramatic climax.

• Language: English
• Publisher: HarperCollins
• Release date: Dec 31, 2013
• ISBN: 9780062325617

Leigh Russell

Leigh Russell is the award-winning author of the Geraldine Steel and Ian Peterson mysteries. She is an English teacher who lives in the UK with her family.

Reviews for Road Closed

[gypsysmom_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Although I categorized this book as a mystery it isn't so much a mystery as a "will they catch the murderer before he/she kills again". As such it didn't have as much tenseness as a traditional murder mystery. DI Geraldine Steel is successful in her career but not so much in her personal life. She works hard investigating murders and no man so far has been prepared to put up with her irregular hours. Returning from a short vacation to Dubrovnik (do people really go from Britain to Croatia for three nights?) with her current love interest she gets caught up in a murder investigation. A house exploded from leaking gas and killed the husband of the couple who owned it. The wife, an IT specialist, had been called in to work in the early morning and arrived back just after the explosion. Suspicion falls on the wife since she was the beneficiary of a large insurance policy and also stood to inherit quite an estate. However, the reader knows that the explosion was due to two burglars who had broken into the house just before the wife was called in to work. She surprised them and as they fled out the door they accidentally turned on the gas on the range top. Eventually the murder investigation ties in the explosion to a string of burglaries which were all committed by cutting a window with glass cutters. In one of the burglaries an elderly woman had died after being pushed down some stairs. So the team is now investigating two murders and a series of burglaries. DI Steel plugs along investigating clues and comes very close several times to solving them. The problem is that witnesses they interview tend to die or disappear soon after they talk to them. Meanwhile her personal life is going to pot as she learns she was adopted, her best friend has been left by her husband and the current beau seems less than attentive. There were a few plot holes (would houses with security lighting really not have an alarm system that included a motion sensor?) and the investigation seemed to take longer than it needed to but it was a quick read and I might read another of this author's books in the future.