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CAST OF SHADOWS
by Kevin Guilfoile
Knopf, March 2005
336 pages
$24.95
ISBN: 1400043085


Buy in the UK | Buy in Canada

There are a handful of writers out there writing medical thrillers, with Robin Cook probably leader of the pack. But Kevin Guilfoile's debut novel CAST OF SHADOWS suggests there might just be a new boy on the block.

Davis Moore is a fertility doctor in Chicago. It's not the safest of professions when your area of expertise is reproductive cloning and the religious extremists are perpetually staking out you and your clinic.

Moore's life falls apart, though, when his teenage daughter Anna Kat is raped and murdered. The case is never solved, but some months later, when Moore retrieves her belongings from the police, he discovers a vial of the killer's DNA amongst the clothes. And here lies the heart of the book as Moore makes the decision to clone his daughter's killer.

CAST OF SHADOWS is peopled by some fascinating characters, including Davis, his colleague Joan, the cloned boy Justin, and the PI-turned-journalist Sally. In many ways, though, it is a disconcerting book. Its structure is jumpy, as it spans 20 years, and several years are often skipped in a matter of paragraphs. And the story is told through a number of eyes, which means we often lose contact with one of these characters for some time.

There's a point, too, at which the book almost becomes a cyber mystery as Sally and Justin take part in Shadow World, a reality computer game, in a bid to track down the killer. It took a few pages to get used to this sudden addition to the story, and it meant the villains seemed rather one-dimensional, but I was rapidly hooked and it was a hell of a way of forwarding the plot.

We're never told exactly when the book takes place, but the assumption is that it's near-future, with the cloning debate and the later references to curing diseases. Whatever, it feels uncomfortably close to now.

So this is no run-of-the-mill crime book. It took me a little while to marshal my thoughts on it and decide what I thought. Guilfoile keeps a twist or two back for the ending, and I have to say I was dissatisfied with the resolution of the religious extremists angle. But it's a book which has been difficult to erase from my mind, due to the moral issues it raises. If you like unusual and challenging crime fiction, read CAST OF SHADOWS and keep a beady eye open for whatever the author does next.

Reviewed by Sharon Wheeler, May 2005

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Contact: Yvonne Klein (ymk@reviewingtheevidence.com)


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