I have read one other Peter May novel which I thought was okay but when the pandemic hit and this book started to be mentioned I thought I'd see how accurate he was about the real thing. He was fairly accurate about a number of things but the problem was that the core story was just so cliched in terms of the killer and the one dimensional writing. The police officer with personal trauma and the 'quirky' forensic scientist (for quirky see not-white and not able bodied). Throw in political shenanigans, money, and a raging pandemic and you have a novel that AI could have written it's so formulaic. Even the hitman character (whose ending was so ludicrous I spent the last three chapters with my jaw on the floor) was just flat. The author tried to make him a bit interesting by throwing some contrary behaviour in there but it didn't really work because shocker, very few people are totally evil or totally good.

My favourite thing about this book was the relationship between the gruff Scottish cop and the aforementioned 'quirky' forensic odontologist. There was some real emotions portrayed there but the rest of it, while perfectly readable, was just a bit meh.