Leigh Russell – Evil Impulse

‘Evil Impulse’ by Leigh Russell is the fifteenth instalment for Geraldine Steel and all I can say is she still isn’t boring! Leigh has a skill of keeping this series as fresh as if it was the first book. For anyone who hasn’t experienced Geraldine Steel before, number one, where have you been? And number two, my advice is read em all! You can just dip into them but to experience the full beauty that is Geraldine I feel it needs the background filling in properly.

In this story, we see Geraldine and Ian Peterson her former sergeant being an unofficial item. This is because she doesn’t want to affect her working relationship and friendship with her DCI. A killer vows to use strangulation on his next victim as we are given a gory description of a woman’s murder that gets messy at the start of the story. In a York canal a woman’s body is discovered, the police presume she has fallen in but the post mortem says she was dead beforehand and she was suffocated. The detectives identify her and suspect her husband. Another woman knows her husband is meeting women and she knows she needs to do something, a teenager goes missing and to top it off

Geraldine finds herself thrown in a van with a hood over her head. The abductors are members of a drugs gang, they attempt to make her work with them and even threaten her sisters life if she refuses. Geraldine avoids telling Ian but eventually does but begs him not to say anything until she has been able to warn her sister. He gives her a week. A week that after what happened previously if she is found out she could lose her career and even get sent to prison… so how is she going to get out of this without getting thrown out of the force at the same time as trying to catch a killer?

A police procedural with such a strong main character such as Geraldine gives us plenty of stuff to delve into and boy, don’t we delve?! Her commitment to her job and the fact that her family loyalty runs deep creates a type of crossover that makes it possible to say that the genre is not just police they can be a family/crime drama also.

I am always anticipating a Geraldine Steele book and enjoy returning to this strong series. The drama and the characters are all like old mates that I need to catch up with! A testament to Leigh’s skill in her writing. Roll on #16!!!

Thank you to Random Things Tours and No Exit Press for my place on the tour and my copy of this book for my review, I am highly honoured to take part!