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Cast of Shadows

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Overview

A bereaved doctor undertakes a diabolical experiment in a shattering philosophical thriller that anticipates the moral, social, and metaphysical dilemmas science is poised to confront.Davis Moore is a fertility doctor in Chicago specializing in reproductive cloning, a controversial and closely regulated new practice, when his seventeen-year-old daughter is brutally raped and murdered. The case is investigated but never solved. Months later, Moore retrieves her belongings from the police, and finds among them a vial containing the killer's DNA. Tormented by grief, Moore entertains a monstrous thought: the possibility of cloning not his daughter but the man who killed her. How far would you go to look into the face of your daughter's murderer Justin Finn, at three, looks like any other child. Bright, joyful, sweet; an innocent toddler to his unsuspecting parents and to all who know him. But his face, one day, will be the exact match of the cold-blooded killer of whom he is a perfect genetic replica.

Editorial Reviews

Guilfoile's engrossing debut novel takes a high-concept look at the age-old but still provocative question of nature vs. nurture. The story centers on Chicago fertility doctor Davis Moore, a pioneer in the field of cloning, whose teenage daughter, Anna Kat, is raped and murdered. When no leads pan out, a desperate Moore secretly uses the killer's DNA to clone him, with the unsuspecting aid of a client couple, so that one day he'll be able to identify the killer by his resemblance to the clone. The novel spins out over more than two decades, following the rocky development of the cloned boy, Justin Finn (whose parents know nothing of his potentially problematic DNA), Moore's monitoring of the young man and Moore's own complicated life. Though nominally a thriller, the book's jolts and tension are driven by character rather than plot, with the unpredictability of Moore, Justin and two other characters keeping the reader constantly off balance. Anna Kat's killer remains an active menace and is eerily close to the Finn family, and the novel also offers a nuanced and chillingly believable portrait of a religious zealot and terrorist, Mickey the Gerund, who racks up a lot of abortion clinic bombings and doctor kills over the years. Guilefoile displays a deep interest in his characters (backstories for all abound), and if his plot is a bit of a patchwork, the novel as a whole is rich and involving. Agent, Simon Lipskar. 7-city author tour. (Mar.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information. -- PUBLISHERS WEEKLY.

Author Information

Bio of Kevin Guilfoile

Kevin Guilfoile has written for McSweeney's, Salon, and The New Republic. He lives in Chicago with his wife and child.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Knopf

Filesize

887.37 KB

Number of Pages

336

eBook ISBN

9781400044795

Awards

  • Great Lakes Book Awards

Excerpt from: Cast of Shadows by Kevin Guilfoile

The detective was polite each morning when he called, and Davis feigned patience each morning when the detective, after small talk, confessed to having no leads. Well, not zero leads, exactly: A profile had been made of the attacker. The police believed he was white and fair-skinned. They had some general idea about his size, based on the placement of the bruises and the force exerted on her arm, breaking it in two, but that ruled out only the unusually short and the freakishly tall. They did not think he was obese, according to their reconstruction of the rape itself. He may or may not have been someone Anna Kat knew ' probably not, because if she had been expecting someone that night she might have told somebody, but then again, who can say

The Medical Examiner said the injuries were consistent with rape, but could not comment on whether the District Attorney would include sexual assault along with the murder charge when police apprehended a suspect. When Davis expressed outrage after that information had appeared in the paper, the detective settled him down and assured him that when a beaten, broken, strangled girl has fresh semen inside her, that ' s a rape in the cops ' book no matter what the M.E. says and then he apologized for putting it that way, for being so goddamn insensitive, and then Davis had to reassure the detective. That ' s all right. He didn ' t want them to be sensitive. He wanted the police to be as angry and raw as he was. The detective understood that the Moores wanted a resolution. "We know you want closure, Dr. Moore, and so do we," he said. "Some of these cases take time."

Often, the police told the Moores, a friend of the victim will think aloud during questioning, "It ' s probably nothing, you know, but there ' s this strange guy who was always hanging around..." This time, none of Anna Kat ' s friends could offer even a cynical theory. Fingerprints were too plentiful to be useful ("It ' s the Gap," the detective said. "Everyone in town has had their palms on that countertop") and they were sure the perpetrator had worn gloves anyway, by the thickness of the bruises on her wrists and neck. Daniel Kinney, Anna Kat ' s off-again boyfriend, was questioned three times. He was appropriately distraught and cooperative, submitting to a blood test and bringing his parents, but never a lawyer.