The Cain Effect describes the critical transformation in which killing becomes reasonable, justified, desirable or necessary in the mind of the person who kills. The book asks us to examine that transformation instead of simply labeling someone a killer after the killing has occurred.

The Killer Disease is the book’s framework for examining the human capacity and developing reasoning that can ultimately lead someone to accept killing. It is not a claim that every person will become violent. Not everyone who carries the Killer Disease experiences the Cain Effect, but everyone who kills failed to rule over it.

No. The central argument distinguishes having human emotions, conflicts and destructive capacities from actually reaching the point where another person’s death becomes an acceptable choice. That distinction is fundamental to the Cain Effect.

The Cain Effect challenges the idea that "natural born killer" is an adequate explanation. Rather than beginning with the killer after the act, the book asks what happened to the human being before the act.

Cain provides one of civilization’s oldest accounts of one human being intentionally killing another. More importantly, the story contains conflict, warning, choice, killing and consequence. That makes Cain relevant not simply because he killed Abel, but because there was a period before Abel was killed.

That question is deliberately central to the book. If the danger existed before the killing, then intervention becomes part of the discussion. And that leads to a modern question: if you knew someone was approaching the point where death made sense, what would you do?

Cain and Abel provide the foundational story and metaphor, but the questions raised by the book extend into human behavior, violent crime, victims, intervention, responsibility and prevention.

Understanding how someone reaches the point of killing is not the same as excusing the killing. Understanding the process may instead give families, communities, professionals and potential victims more opportunity to recognize danger before another person dies.

It is written for anyone willing to examine violent death from a different starting point: before the killing happened.