The book I just finished: I'm irritated that the author left behind the truly interesting second viewpoint character of her last work and focused this one almost entirely on her too-mopey-Goth-for-words MC. She's basically a huge dreary downer a lot of the time, and the plot doesn't give her sufficiently frequent kicks in the rear to shift her into fanatic-problem-solver mode until pretty late in the game. She's fun in that latter mode, not so much in the stuck-in-the-past lifeless dwelling on past loves, past failures, and whatnot that she does a bit too indulgently early on.
Sure, it made sense that she couldn't take Interesting Second Character with her in this one (said character had to stay where she was, earthshaking doomly stuff had to happen elsewhere) but I wish the author had recognized better that someone else with a bit more fire in the belly was needed for balance, and made one of the secondary characters like that.
Oh, and as to your (Devil's) initial irritation about a 65 year old not understanding power windows: they were first used in 1940, albeit on American luxury cars, and became somewhat common from the 1950s on in the US, at least. By the 60s they were an available option, at the very least, on every model that wasn't an utter bargain basement offering.
I'm guessing that Major Pettigrew is English, and such things were a little slower to catch on there, but power windows were available on upper-end models from mass-market manufacturers like Ford from the late 70s if not earlier. He sounds like a character for whom the world was set fixed from some point in the 60s, which is increasingly ludicrous the more recent the books are supposed to be set…