This was French's follow up to In the Woods. It centers around Cassie Maddox, an investigator who is now working in the Domestic Violence unit in a police station in Ireland. One morning, she gets an hysterical call from her boyfriend who is asking her to come to a Murder crime scene. At the scene, she finds the body of a young woman who looks disturbingly like her and her ID says that she's Lexie Maddison - a cover that belonged to Cassie when she worked undercover. Cassie is asked to step into "Lexie's" life as an undercover agent to gain information about Lexie's life and who could possibly be the killer.

Lexie is living with 4 other college students, all postgrads in English, in a large, crumbling house. Her housemates are all quite interesting and it was fascinating to watch their stories unfold. This was another great summer read! ( )

This was a great book. I don't normally read mysteries but I couldn't put this one down. The character development was wonderful and the suspense had me staying up till one in the morning to finish it. Highly recommended. ( )

The Likeness
Tana French

In French’s debut novel, In the Woods, she introduces the character of Detective Cassie Maddox, who started out in the Dublin police force as an undercover agent, then moved to the Murder Squad. Her involvement in Operation Vestal Virgin cause a permanent estrangement from her partner Rob Ryan, and scarred Cassie herself who, by the end of that book, transferred out of Murder and into Domestic Violence.

The Likeness is Cassie’s story; she is the narrator. It is through her eyes and shfting perceptions that we see the unfolding undercover investigation into the murder of a young woman who is Cassie’s exact double--and who has been using Cassie’s completely fake undercover name, Alexandra Madison from her time in Undercover six years previously. Alexandra, or Lexie, had been a post-graduate student at Trinity College in Dublin and lived with four misfits in an odd situation in an old Georgian manor recently inherited by one of the group. However, no one knows outside of a few police officers that Lexie is really dead. Frank, her old boss in Undercover, persuades Cassie to impersonate Lexie in order to infiltrate the group to get a lead on the murderer. To do so effectively, Cassie must assume Lexie’s persona completely--how she walks, how she holds a cigarette, how she laughs--as well as absorb enough information to slide into the group. In other words, she has to become Lexie while remaining Cassie Maddox with a face that goes with both women.

French has written a superb police procedural cum psychological thriller, with enough subtle twists to satisfy any reader. We see everything through Cassie’s eyes, and we watch her struggle against becoming completely subsumed by Lexie’s personality; in fact, the greater struggle is whether to fight it at all.

The story is powerful, absorbing, a real page-turner. French’s writing is perfect; she sets moods and reveals psychological states, follows the action and delivers dialogue in the same, elegant, off-beat manner in which she wrote In The Woods only with a more economy of words--the plot never falters. Cassie is a more complex character than Rob Ryan, and French spends more time with her than she did with Rob. The result is, in my opinion, better than In The Woods--tauter,more subtly complex, with far more richly developed characters.

A gem of a book, not to be missed. Highly recommended. ( )

Wow. The author has a way with words. She draws you into the undercover experience to the extent that when people speak to the main character as Cassie, you unconsciously wonder why they are calling her that. The point of this book isn't really the whodunit or even the why; its the experience of finding those answers. ( )

I don't know about you, but I read mysteries and thrillers the same way I eat popcorn. In big, greedy handfuls, with bits and pieces falling to the wayside. Not really savoring it, just one goal in mind, get to the end. Eat it all, finish the bowl. I'm ashamed to say that alot of times when I read a thriller, a week later, I can hardly remember what I've read. I read them so quickly, they just don't have time to create memories in my mind.

I am happy to say that it was not so with The Likeness: A Novel by Tara French.

Here is the requisite jacket blurb:

Six months after the events of In the Woods, Detective Cassie Maddox is still recovering. Transferred out of Dublin’s Murder squad at her own request, she vows never to return. That is, until her boyfriend, Detective Sam O’Neill, calls her one beautiful spring morning, urgently asking her to come to a murder scene in the small town of Glenskehy.

It isn’t until Cassie sees the body that she understands Sam’s insistence. The dead girl is Cassie’s double, and she carries ID identifying her as Alexandra Madison, an alias Cassie herself used years ago when she worked undercover. The question becomes not only who killed this girl, but who was this girl?

Frank Mackey, Cassie’s former undercover boss, sees the opportunity of a lifetime. Having played Lexie Madison once before, Cassie is in the perfect position to take her place. The police will tell the media and Lexie’s four housemates that the stab wound wasn’t fatal. And Cassie will go on living Lexie’s life until the killer is lured out to finish off the job.

It’s a brilliant idea, until Cassie finds herself more emotionally involved in Lexie’s life than she anticipated. Sharing the ramshackle old Whitethorn House with Lexie’s strange, tight-knit group of university friends, Cassie is slowly seduced by the victim’s way of life, by the thought of working on a murder investigation again, and by the mystery of the victim herself. As Cassie nears the truth about what happened to Lexie Madison and who she really was, the lines between professional and personal, work and play, reality and fantasy become desperately tangled, and Cassie finds herself on the edge of losing herself forever.

I think it was the setting of the story that really set this apart from just a plain old mystery to me. The housemates in this story share this lovely old home. They don't watch television or play on a computer, instead they spend their time fixing up the house, playing old-fashioned games and cards, talking, and reading. So, while I was keeping tabs on the mystery, I was also enjoying the lifestyle of the characters. Usually I read thrillers because I want to be caught up in the mystery and I read other books because I want to be caught up in the story and the characters, this book gave me both. ( )