At other times, the guest characters are so shallow they fade into one another without stirring any interest in distinguishing between them. And the few that could have been interesting have fifty pages or so of storyline and then disappear into the mists until the end of the book. Ending is predictable and convenient, a bit pointless in fact. One minor character takes the action that saves the day, not the Doctor nor his companions who merely figure out what's going on, not really how to stop it. Another minor character takes the spotlight in a rather scary capacity at the end, offering to clean everything up and make peace, implying neither the author nor the characters learned anything from the experience.
Nobody sees the blood and nobody learns the lesson.
The Doctor is not dumb. Certainly he is not THIS dumb. I couldn't figure out how what he said related in any way to what we saw happen in the story. It was thrown in as almost an afterthought at the end of the book. All in all, it's not horrible . . .