Just Finished Reading James Patterson's The 6th Target

So far I understand there have been fifteen books published in James Patterson's Women's Murder Club crime series.  I'm reading them in numerical order, having just finished The 6th Target.  This is another Patterson novel in which he shares writing credits with another, the collaborator again being Maxine Paetro.  As is the general pattern in this series, main protagonist Lindsay Boxer, a San Francisco police homicide officer, is embroiled in trying to catch a seriously deranged killer. This time one of her best friends, a fellow member of the informal group called Women's Murder Club, has been shot and seriously wounded.  And there are two other ongoing mysteries as well: abductions of precocious children of wealthy families...along with their nannies, and a series of nasty crimes committed at the apartment complex where Cindy, another "Club" member, resides.  As I read on into the novel, I kept expecting these three distinctly separate story lines to come together at the end, but no...Patterson/Paetro apparently decided to take what could have been three different short stories and combine them into the format of a single novel, adding assorted subplots involving the personal and professional life of Boxer.  I wasn't very surprised, since the same sort of thing happened with the previous book in the series, The 5th Horseman...

These Patterson crime novels are pretty short and simple to read, and I have no problem getting hold of them.  But there is something disturbing about the attitudes of the "good guys", i.e. the police, in these stories.  They tend to be insulting and unnecessarily rough with suspects, something that is easy enough for the reader to support since he or she enjoys the advantage of already knowing their guilt.  But in real life, being picked up and interrogated and/or arrested for a crime is all on the side of our system of justice known as "presumed innocent".  However, the cops in Lindsay Boxer's SF Police Department seem to go on the presumption "guilty until proven innocent".  I've seen this kind of attitude in numerous movies...Clint Eastwood's Harry Callahan series is a prime example...and several television police series.  Maybe the notion promoted in many of these shows that the police should be the arbiters of justice instead of the courts is why I have a sense of aversion to them.  It certainly doesn't help me to get through this Women's Murder Club series...