Cast of Shadows (Hardcover)

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Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Set in a not too distant future after human cloning is legalized, this debut thriller is a disquieting pseudo-scientific meditation on what happens when the teenage daughter of a leading fertility specialist is brutally murdered and her father uses his professional skills and a bit of DNA extracted from the death scene to create a copy of her killer. Unlucky, unlikely Justin Finn is the result of Dr. Davis Moore's faith that one day he’ll look into the eyes and soul of the man who raped and strangled Anna Kat and understand what drove him to do it. His plan destroys his marriage, compromises his professional ethics, and threatens his own life, but all these complications pale next to the repercussion his efforts to clone Anna Kat's murderer have on the young man whose future is as predestined as his origins. Despite the shades of Robin Cook that hover over this intricately woven and unsettling mystery, Guilfoile's pacing is solid, his characterizations well drawn, and his own future as a writer assured. --Jane Adams

From Publishers Weekly

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.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 336 pages
• Publisher: Knopf (March 1, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1400043085
• ISBN-13: 978-1400043088
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.5 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (48 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #920,571 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

15 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Fabulous Idea, Spotty Execution, But Worth a Look, July 30, 2005

By	Paul Frandano (Reston, Va. USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I'm a sucker for certain types of commercial bait - a review that compares a pop record favorably to a transitional Beatles record like "Revolver" or "Sgt. Pepper's," or a jazz record to "Kind of Blue" or "Saxophone Colossus," or a novelist to "Faulkner" or "Roth." What got me on to Kevin Guilfoile's Cast of Shadows was a reviewer's approving nod to "this modern-day Frankenstein tale" - a line that summoned up Ur-resonances within me that have jangled through my neural system since first fired in a movie theater 50 years ago. (That comparison, it turns out, was apparently concocted by a Knopf publicist and eagerly grabbed up by several hook-hungry, imagination-deprived book "critics.")

So that's how I have the book in my hands.

For the first 100 pages or so, I found the story of fertility specialist Davis Moore, his murdered daughter, his slipping marriage and slow-fuse relationship with an attractive female colleague, and his hope-against-hope plan to clone his daughter's murderer slow going but plausible, with cloning, its politics, and its ethical and religious implications interestingly evoked and explored. Strangely, as the pace picked up and little Justin Finn's development is chronicled, the book began gliding into implausibility - in Guilfoile's near-future Chicago, pace and plausibility seem inversely related. There were more key coincidences than a Dickens novel, more than a fair share of character-motivation issues, and an epic 20-year time span that seems disproportionate to the book's preoccupations, which, although weighty, are distinctly less than epic. This is, at bottom, a futuristic murder mystery.

By the time I was in the second hundred pages, however, I was not only invested in the story but hooked: I was rooting for Guilfoile, wanting the book to work for its daring to take up difficult ethical and philosophical themes - regardless of the hard time the author had in finding the literary voice for such exposition (sometimes a neat aside, other times a clunky lecture, but generally striking a good rhetorical balance). I thought Justin, the cloned boy, an absorbing, complex, believable character, and I liked the way Guilfoile used the "Shadow World" computer-game subtext that, with the exponential information-technology advances of the past decade, seemed the least contrived element of a storyline I suspect Guilfoile felt forced to "over-contrive."

Knowing he had a nice idea, Guilfoile also knew he needed a lengthy fictional timespan to play it out - at least 300 pages for two decades and a fuller, more populated world. He thus invented a large cast of characters, some of whom do the heavy literary lifting across long spans of time (but who in that long stretch generally undergo little change). Many others comprise a long list of "fifth business" types who matter very little, and appear very briefly, but whom Guilfoile makes essential in one way or another to advancing his story. With all this, and despite its bursts of energy, Cast of Shadows struck me as a fairly long 320 page book that during my beach week had me flipping back and forth in keeping the Jackies and Joans and Sallies and Marthas straight.

Among the book's considerable attractions, however, is Guilfoile's literary deftness. He observes closely, sees things at an odd angle, and turns a handsome descriptive line. For instance, "He liked to grip a book with both hands, as if the knowledge were entering through his fingers instead of his eyes" to describe the precocious Justin's intense preference for hardcovers over paperbacks. And Guilfoile dares to ruminate on philosophical themes - he has a clear eye for the ethical issues surrounding fertility and abortion, enjoys parsing them, and has a taste for the Great Books and the eternal moral questions, references to which are sprinkled throughout his book. Yes, he's capable of producing a howler or two - how about "The words drilled into his heart and uncorked a gusher of rage"? And he sometimes likes to overdescribe the inconsequential - "He let a sip of Shiraz trickle down the back of his throat." Consider such passages a first-time novelist's entitlement of Mulligans (and hope for a more attentive editor next time around). Guilfoile can write.

Cast of Shadows isn't Frankenstein (although The Modern Prometheus theme is front and center), and Guilfoile isn't Mary Shelley, but he's ambitious in much the same way, and his book is worthy: a clear cut above most summer fare - more literary and cerebral than the average thriller, daring to take on large moral and religious themes, leading the reader to weigh serious issues that we may indeed find ourselves grappling with in not too long a time, but still with a measure of thrills and ingenious twists...and a conclusion I found quite satisfying. I don't think Cast of Shadows will haunt my imagination, but I have no difficulty recommending it for late-summer reading lists.

12 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but badly flawed, January 5, 2006

By	Samer T Ismail "SF & classical music fan" (Danbury, CT) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book came out nearly a year ago; please note there are spoilers in this review.

I tried to read this book, and only managed to get through the "present-day" parts of the book before two things happened: one, I figured out where the book was going, and two, I got disgusted by it.

While I admire Guilfoile's premise, the scientific underpinnings of this novel are so badly flawed that they ruin the entire book.

First is the so-called "nature versus nurture" debate, the question of how much control our genes exert on our lives. "Cast of Shadows" assumes essentially absolute determinism: a clone will be the spitting image, mind and body, of the person cloned. This borders on the absurd: if that were the case, all identical twins would be completely identical, which certainly is not the case.

Second, he completely wrecks the character of Justin's birth mother. Obviously, Guilfoile needed some reason why she could not have a child using her own eggs, but he blithely chose to make her a "carrier" of Huntington's disease. The problem here is twofold: there are no carriers for Huntington's; if you have a defective gene for it, and live long enough, you *will* inherit the disease. And yet, this woman has absolutely no problem bringing a child into the world, and apparently is unaware of the death sentence hanging over her head. It seriously begs the question of whether Guilfoile bothered to have any geneticists proofread this book.

For a premise as intriguing as this one was, it was a shame that it was so badly mishandled here.

9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Riveting, Suspenseful, and Intellectually Challenging, March 19, 2005

By	Bookreporter.com (New York, New York) - See all my reviews

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 for some time to come. It is simply, and surely, not to be missed.

--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub