Ah ok, SQL syntax. That's the one thing I didn't try before.
Thanks for the explanation.

This behavior might be worth a FAQ entry, as it is not very obvious, how search strings are parsed by the plugin. Especially the different handling of asterisks, depending on the position in the search pattern.
While we are at it: Did you check, how the parser handles literal percent signs? If they are not escaped before passing them to the SQL search, this may also lead to unexpected results. I admit that this is not a very common use case, but may spare you one or two support cases in the future.
