"These people are idiots," he tells his friend Dr. Wolfsohn when the doctor's plan to convert to Islam for Mina's sake goes horrifically wrong.
But even the most thorough background check cannot guarantee that something will not go horrifically wrong, as it did on Thursday when, the police say, two young Upper West Side children were killed by their nanny, Yoselyn Ortega.
His investigation goes horrifically wrong and his bad conscience, his festering awareness of career mortality and his screwed-up circadian rhythms mean that he is driven slowly mad with sleep deprivation: a kind of fatal familial insomnia of the soul.
Smokeheads, by Doug Johnstone (Faber, £12.99) Written in spare, no-frills prose, Johnstone's third novel is the tale of Adam, a thirtysomething whisky-anorak, who takes three friends to Islay for a weekend of malts, coke and fun which goes horrifically wrong.
("You know when women say 'Oh man I got so shitfaced last night and I should never have made it with that guy'? Well, that could be us! We could be that mistake!") Things go horrifically wrong when Fogell is picked up while trying to buy booze by two incompetent cops, played by Bill Hader and Rogen himself.
"Very tragically, something has gone horrifically wrong, and a young child of one of our members drowned in the pool.
"Something has gone horrifically wrong" he said, adding that the North Kensington community were "demanding answers and they are entitled to those answers".
Ambushing Ammons as he got out of his car, Carroll confronted him on the death of the marching band student, an apparent hazing incident gone horrifically wrong.
But on a gray day, with a chill in the air, it also feels something like the establishing scenes of a Hitchcock movie, before things go so horrifically wrong.
