Cast of Shadows: A Novel

by Kevin Guilfoile

Book 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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1400078261
• ISBN13: 9781400078264
• Release Date: May 2006
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 319 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.8" x 5.3"

Customer Reviews

Amazing, "can't put it down" and thought provoking

This book is simply amazing. It not only poses wonderful ethical questions about cloning but it lays a story which brillantly weaves its characters and story lines together. I find myself pondering questions this book very subtley asks each reader well after I finished it. Kevin doesn't lecture and force his ideals and viewpoints on the reader--THANK YOU-- but he does bring up contraversional issues delicately and lets the reader figure out on what side of the fence he/she is on. It's a MUST read for everyone!

Incredible suspense and great plot twists

How far would you go to catch a violent killer? What if he'd killed your teenage daughter? Dr. Davis Moore, a well-known geneticist, faces a frightening moral dilemma when he gets the opportunity to secretly clone his daughter's killer and implant the resulting embryo in the womb of an unsuspecting woman. His plan is to watch the child grow up and, eventually, look into the face of the killer and possibly identify him. That fateful decision affects the lives of dozens of people--that of his fragile wife; the pediatrician who ends up sharing his secret; a private investigator-turned-reporter, and ultimately, the child himself, Justin Finn, who turns out to be smarter--and scarier--than Dr. Moore ever anticipated. Set in the near future and frighteningly believable, Guilfoile tracks this complex story over twenty years, through the minds of all the major players and several on the fringes, and through a video-game universe that has become a world-wide obsession. Every time I thought I had it figured out, I was wrong--right up until the very last page. The villains (and no one in this book is truly innocent) are so well-motivated that I found myself understanding and almost sympathizing with every character at one time or another. An incredible debut novel from a writer to watch.

Fascinating Near Future Novel

The only thing disappointing about this book is that it is Guilfoile's first novel, and I can't rush out and buy any previous novels that he has written. The tale occurs in the near future when human cloning has become legal, and the protagonist is Dr. Moore, a fertility doctor, whose daughter has been raped and murdered. While grieving over the loss he inadvertently comes across a semen sample of the murderer, and impulsively clones a baby from this sample. He wants to follow the child's development so that he can see what his daughter's murderer looks like. Some reviewers have deemed the plot of this book to be preposterous, but seem to not realize that the book takes place some years from now, and continues for another 17 years, and thus essentially qualifies as science fiction. Essential to the plot is a highly sophisticated virtual reality computer program, which seems to be quite possible given the novel's time frame. After all, I purchased my first computer game in 1984 for my IBM XT, and it was all text, no graphics. Today's games would seem impossible back in those days. When Dr. Moore clones the child named Jason, he has no idea how his life and those around him will be changed. Startling new developments and plot twists kept me glued to the book. It's an exciting thriller with a truly unexpected ending. I have no interest in stories that pass over the edge of credibility, and believe me this book doesn't do that at all. Very highly recommended.

Deserves every bit of hype

I bought and read this book on the strength of the great reviews it has been getting. Kevin Guilfoile is getting a ton of hype and I tend to be skeptical about that so was hesitant at first and honestly did not expect much. Well, let me try and explain how wrong I was. This book is such a brilliant debut...I was hooked from the first few chapters and literally could not stop reading until finished. The wonderful and most surprising thing about this novel is not the incredibly inventive premise, the elegant economical prose or even the complicated web of plots and subplots. It is how effortlessly and elegantly Guilfoile HANDLES all of it. You are led down a very weighty path of twists and turns...and yet it remains breathless and present and completely enthralling. There is something so easy about how Cast of Shadows is digested...in spite of a great deal of complexity and elevated language. As if this was not enough, Guilfoile's sense of character is so rare and wonderful. He understands that complexity cannot be told, it has to be shown. We discover these people...they are revealed by what they do and what they think. It is so organic and real. Everyone is flawed and human. There are so many stunning, loaded sentences about the main character's marriage....I found myself reading and re-reading these moments. You would literally understand volumes about these people from a single sentence about their domestic living. There are off handed references to Davis taking care of his drunk wife that are completely haunting. The brilliance of this is it is not central to the story at all...just the ingredients of brilliant, not-to-be-taken-lightly artistry. A big mistake would be to merely see COS as a mystery thriller. The depth here is amazing...he blows away his contemporaries. Guilfoile has written a book about PEOPLE that just happens to be wrapped in an amazingly complex, suspensful wrapper. His talent is undeniable. Can't wait to read the next book!! Go out and read this one...and then read it again!!

Riveting, Suspenseful, and Intellectually Challenging

I thought I was going to dislike CAST OF SHADOWS. The premise seemed flimsy at best. The daughter of a physician is murdered. The physician, a pioneer in the field of reproductive cloning, is able to obtain the DNA of her murderer and engineers his cloning for the purpose of identifying the killer. Yawn. It sounded vaguely like a plot that Michael Crichton would have rejected, and wisely so, sometime back in the 1980s. And the author, Kevin Guilfoile, was stuck in my memory bank as a kind of self-styled humorist whose work had left me with the vague impression of someone who is clever but not smart. I accordingly cracked the binding of CAST OF SHADOWS with the thought that I could try it for an hour or so and then leave it unread. Well, I didn't have to get very deeply at all into CAST OF SHADOWS before I realized that this debut novel is quite like the house of one of the characters in the story: much, much bigger on the inside than it looks from the outside, full of twists and turns and corners and surprises. The aforementioned physician, Davis Moore, is a sympathetic character --- his teenage daughter is murdered --- but he's not entirely a likeable guy, kind of sanctimonious, full of self-justification, and content to follow rules until he has a reason to break them. Moore uses his medical practice as a vehicle to exact revenge. One can understand the concept of revenge, especially in a case like this, but there isn't exactly full disclosure exercised here with respect to Moore's patient or to the resulting life in being, at least not initially. Moore keeps track of Justin Finn, the cloned child. And yes, indeed, he comes to resemble someone very, very twisted. But this is more than a tale of rough judgment and exacted revenge. Guilfoile crafts a tale that is riveting, excruciatingly suspenseful, and intellectually challenging. Part speculative fiction, part suspense and part horror, CAST OF SHADOWS deals with a future so close that it is not just around the corner but is only a half-block away and approaching fast. Guilfoile's story is peppered with a number of interesting, and flawed, supporting characters, and also introduces an online virtual reality game called Shadow World. Shadow World plays an integral part in the novel, to the extent that it is a character unto itself. It is such a fascinating concept, in fact, that it alone is worth the investment in the book. CAST OF SHADOWS also presents a number of moral and ethical issues in dramatic settings, all of them difficult, all of them important. It is also much deeper than one would expect. Guilfoile takes the reader through so many twists and turns, particularly at the end, that it is only after extended reflection that one realizes what a truly steep and wild ride it has been. As complex as Guilfoile's plot is, however, he so carefully lays out his path that it is impossible for the reader to get lost. CAST OF SHADOWS is a book that will be read, savored, discussed, and argued fo