Gary was sitting on his hospital cot, staring into space, when I arrived. His shoulder sling was gone. It was hard to come and talk to this kidnapper, child-killer, serial killer. I remembered something the philosopher Spinoza once wrote: “I have striven not to laugh at human actions, not to weep at them, nor to hate them, but to understand them.”
Alex is constantly striving to understand how the human mind works, and his inspiration comes from sources that might seem surprising for a detective to consider. To Alex, a thinker like Baruch Spinoza, who studied religion through a scientific lens, focuses his investigative work. This thought process runs throughout the series, Alex saying in Violets Are Blue, “’Human existence must be a kind of error. It is bad today and every day it will get worse, until the worst of all happens.’ My own philosophy was a little cheerier than [Arthur] Schopenhauer’s.”
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