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By the author of the famous Lewis Trilogy.
Who is Enzo Macleod?
Written by Scottish television screenwriter, novelist, and crime writer Peter May, the Enzo Macleod series – also known as “The Enzo Files” – is presented as a mix of whodunit, investigation, thrills, suspense, and humor.
Here is how Peter May described his character: Enzo is in his early fifties, half-Scottish, half-Italian. Formerly one of Scotland’s top forensic scientists, he now lives in France and works as a university professor in Toulouse. Divorced in Scotland, and widowed in France, he has an estranged Scottish daughter, and another in France whom he has had to raise on his own.
Enzo is a complex character who deals with tragic loss and a broken heart by covering it up with bluff and bluster, and his bravado often gets him into difficult situations.
Enzo Macleod Books in Order:
Every book in the Enzo Macleod series works as a standalone story, but the lives of the different characters evolve from one novel to the other.
- Extraordinary People (aka Dry Bones) – Half-Scottish, half-Italian Enzo MacLeod used to be one of the top forensics experts in Scotland, and now he lives in Toulouse, working as a university professor. Divorced in Scotland and widowed in France, he has an estranged Scottish daughter and a French daughter he has raised by himself. As if his life isn’t complicated enough, he soon finds himself unexpectedly on the hunt for solutions to some vexing cold cases thanks to an ill-advised wager about the power of forensic science.
- The Critic (aka A Vintage Corpse) – The body of Gil Petty, America’s most celebrated wine critic, is found strung up in a French Gaillac vineyard, dressed in the ceremonial robes of the Order of the Divine Bottle and pickled in wine. For forensic expert Enzo Macleod, the key to this unsolved murder lies in decoding Petty’s mysterious reviews, which could make or break a vineyard’s reputation.
- Blacklight Blue – Diagnosed with a terminal illness, Enzo Macleod is running out of time to crack the most confounding of unsolved French murders. His daughter is nearly killed, Enzo is mugged – and then he is arrested. Someone is trying to destroy his character. Someone is framing him for murder. Killers from the past will stop at nothing to halt Enzo, who must use all his forensic skills to solve the case – before they succeed.
- Freeze Frame – Forensics expert Enzo Macleod travels to a tiny island off the coast of Brittany to honor a promise he made long ago to a dead man, to investigate his 20-year-old murder. In a fascinating development, Enzo learns that the man’s study–the scene of the crime–has been completely untouched ever since. In the claustrophobic environment of the island’s close-knit community, where the locals have no desire to see this painful case reopened, Macleod must try to find clues in plain sight that earlier investigators missed.
- Blowback – Seven years ago, France’s top chef, Marc Fraysse, summoned the world’s culinary press to his remote restaurant in central France to make an announcement that he said would cause shockwaves in the culinary community. Instead of an announcement, the reporters were shocked to find instead that the great chef had been murdered and they left without a clue about the message the chef intended to deliver or who might have killed him.
- Cast Iron – In 1989, a killer dumped the body of 20-year-old Lucie Martin into a picturesque lake in the west of France. Fourteen years later, during a summer heat wave, a drought exposed her remains. No one was ever convicted of her murder. But now, forensic expert Enzo Macleod is reviewing this stone-cold case – the toughest of those he has been challenged to solve.
- The Night Gate – In a sleepy French village, the body of a man shot through the head is disinterred by the roots of a fallen tree. A week later a famous art critic is viciously murdered in a nearby house. The deaths occurred more than seventy years apart. Asked by a colleague to inspect the site of the former, forensics expert Enzo Macleod quickly finds himself embroiled in the investigation of the latter.
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