Was Kant a serial killer?

Or maybe he wasn't the actual killer, but had just created one? Somehow this premise of Critique of Criminal Reason by Michael Gregorio just stretched me the wrong way, so even though I had read several positive reviews (Booklist, Washington Post, & Publishers Weekly) the book has not inspired me to read additional works. According to Amazon.com, Michael Gregorio is the pen name for two academics, Michael G. Jacob and Daniela De Gregorio. She teaches philosophy, he teaches English (www.michaelgregorio.it or www.michaelgregorio.info). It is certainly a dark and brooding consideration of the limits of rationality in dealing with out-of-limits human behavior. Set in early 19th c Konigsberg on the eve of Napolean's threatened invasion, paranoia about spies is intense, the weather is brutally cold, and someone is killing ordinary citizens without appearing to leave a trace of how it was done--leading some to suspect supernatural forces. Immanuel Kant recruits a young protege to investigate the murders and passes along the strategies which would later inform forensic investigations.

On the bright side, I read a young adult book by Neal Shusterman called Unwind, which I can recommend. This is set in a future century, following the Second Civil War, when a compromise has been reached by the pro-life and pro-choice factions. From "The Bill of Life":

• ...human life may not be touched from the moment of conception until a child reaches the age of thirteen.
• However, between the ages of thirteen and eighteen, a parent may choose to retroactively "abort" a child...
• ...on the condition that the child's life doesn't "technically" end.
• The process by which a child is both terminated and yet kept alive is called "unwinding."

Unwinding is a euphemism for disseminating all their body parts to those needing replacements, somewhat reminiscent of Nancy Farmer's story House of the Scorpion. The protagonists of this tale don't agree with the parents and state home authorities that they should be unwound and so escape, at least temporarily, via a system somewhat like the earlier underground railroad, to a safe haven in the Arizona desert. It's an interesting speculation on how far people can go to rationalize irrational behavior. The main characters, two boys and a girl, are well-developed, flawed as you would expect of children in such a situation, and yet remarkably resilient. I defnitely will find more of Shusterman's books to read.