Chauvinistic Apologist and STUPID cops

This book REALLY disappointed me. Chauvinistic apologist author Nick Louth depicts men who decide to commit unethical (and some illegal) acts, then explains that they couldn’t be expected to do anything else, because they’re men. Shoulder shrugs, let’s just move on.
****Spoiler Alert:

These “can’t help how they behave because of their Y chromosomes” men also allow themselves to be played again and again by a young woman with a hugely obvious motive for the murders.

What’s additionally disappointing is how absolutely STUPID Nick Louth makes the investigators, including the women who are neither distracted nor played by the female suspects.

For example, hours before the end of this The Bodies At Westgrave Hall audiobook, HUGE clues are provided to the investigators (and us ;-) ) as to the means and method of the killings. More-obvious clues continue to appear, yet the investigators miss all of them. When, at the end of this novel, an investigator FINALLY pays attention to (some of) the earlier-provided clues, the rest of his team STILL doesn’t get it, and needs a detailed explanation to understand what their team leader is talking about.

Also, in a sadly realistic echo of real life, various investigators develop theories early on, and some doggedly stick to them, despite evidence against their theories, while others merely change their theories, then stick to THEM, despite evidence to the contrary. Oh! And, at least once, the lead investigator tells his team to not have theories but to follow the evidence, then proceeds to ignore this direction, and lets his team do the same.

As a Criminologist, I know that, time and again, investigators ignore evidence that goes against their theories of the crime, and only seek to back up their theories. Senior Criminologist Dr. Kim Rossmo has attempted, and continues to attempt, to get police officers and their departments to realize that investigators SHOULD and NEED, once they have zeroed in on one particular suspect, to do all they can to discover any evidence showing that the suspect could NOT have committed the crime. Why? To prevent charging, prosecuting, and convicting persons who did NOT commit the crime. As Dr. Rossmo has examined multiple cases of wrongful conviction (aka conviction/court-decided guilt of a person who did NOT commit the crime), and investigated ones such as that of David Milgaard, whom, after Milgaard’s mother finally succeeded in convincing authorities to have her son’s case reviewed, Dr. Rossmo demonstrated was innocent of the crime for which he had spent more than 20 years in a Canadian federal prison, and led to Milgaard being released after spending 23 years in a Canadian federal prison, HE KNOWS WHAT HE’S TALKING ABOUT.
(Dr. Kim Rossmo is also the person who invented geographical profiling while serving as a police officer, and fought long and hard to convince his colleagues and bosses at the Vancouver Police Department to pay attention to the geographic profile he had worked up of the serial killer of many women [and to admit that there even WAS a serial killer at work in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside neighbourhood]. Once the Vancouver Police Department FINALLY did so, Dr. Rossmo’s geographic profiling led to the identification and arrest of serial killer Robert Pickton. Dr. Kim Rossmo prevented Pickton from murdering more women, and has enabled police departments all over the world to identify criminals who otherwise would not have been investigated.)

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