The thing that startled me most is how often detectives know exactly whodunit and can’t do a thing about it. In detective novels (including mine) and TV series, almost all of the focus is on finding out who committed the murder. That’s at the heart of the plot arc; that occupies about 99 percent of the detectives’ time and energy, that’s the moment of revelation that will transform everything. But one of the things I learned while I was researching is that, in reality, identifying the murderer is often the easy part. Once you’ve done that, you still have to get evidence that will stand up in court—and that can be a long, tangled, excruciating, and sometimes hopeless struggle. Often detectives are absolutely sure who committed a murder very early in the investigation, but they put months or years of work into trying to get the suspect to confess, trying to break his alibi, trying to find a piece of forensic evidence to link him to the crime—and sometimes nothing works, and they’re left to watch him get away with it.
It should thus not be surprising, although it is for many people, that most branches of modern science were founded by believers in creation . The list of creationist scientists is impressive. 18 A sample: