Cast Of Shadows

Product Description 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. Can a three-year-old have a past? Where does evil come from? What happens to the soul when we die? What are you duplicating when you duplicate a human life?Cast of Shadows is a spectacularly original, hair-raising novel about the fate of a little boy brought into the world to solve a crime. Relentlessly gripping, profoundly unsettling, and visionary, it introduces a major new suspense novelist. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Davis Moore is a fertility doctor in Chicago specializing in reproductive cloning. When his daughter is raped and murdered by an unknown assailant, he entertains a monstrous thought...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 parent