Cast of Shadows

Cast of Shadows is a novel by American author Kevin Guilfoile, published in Chinese as Touying (Projection). The story is set in Chicago, where Dr. Davis Moore, a reproductive medicine specialist, conducts controversial and strictly regulated research on reproductive cloning. His seventeen-year-old daughter is brutally raped and murdered, and the police fail to solve the case for a long time. About a year and a half later, Moore retrieves his daughter's belongings from the police and unexpectedly obtains a sample containing the killer's DNA. Driven by grief and obsession, he makes a terrible decision: instead of cloning his daughter, he will clone her killer, so that the killer's appearance, temperament, and future will gradually unfold before his eyes. The boy conceived from this DNA, Justin Finn, grows up like an ordinary child with unaware parents, yet remains under Moore's long-term surveillance. Meanwhile, an organization calling itself the Hand of God regards cloning as sacrilege and sends assassins to hunt down scientists engaged in reproductive research; Moore is on their list. As the novel unfolds along two lines—the pursuit of the killer and the counter-pursuit—it asks whether genes determine good and evil, what exactly is copied when a person is cloned, and whether humans have the right to play God.