A review by ianbanks
Extraordinary People by Peter May

3.0

Read this all in one sitting but - as I am crap at mysteries - if I'm able to guess "whodunnit," then the author hasn't really done their job well enough. I really enjoyed the links between the clues and the way they interacted with history and popular culture as well as the way the characters came to trust and become a team (and the running gag with the metal detector was brilliant). However, I think Mr May was a late adaptor of the internet because to have characters gaping at the number of search results that come up when typing something into Google is so 1996 (the novel was originally published in 2006). And it happens repeatedly. It also didn't help that the main character is a pony-tailed Scotsman named McLeod who is investigating a beheading (well, general dismemberment, really) in Paris (but I probably would have found a Queen soundtrack a little distracting, though). A well-researched and really good fun read, despite these flaws, which are more biases of my own.