The Likeness by Tana French

A few weeks ago I read In the Woods by Tana French, an absorbing mystery set in Dublin. I enjoyed French's style, and was enthusiastic to read what came next.

The Likeness picks up, plot-wise, where its predecessor left off. But instead of following the same narrator, it focuses on Cassie Maddox, the (now former) partner of the previous protagonist, Rob Ryan. Basically, after the events of the last novel, Cassie is left completely burned out. She has ditched her primo Murder job to join the much less glamorous Domestic Violence squad, and struggles to get through the day-to-day mundanities, despite a supportive boyfriend (Sam, who's still a Murder detective) and a job with much less pressure.

But lest we think Cassie is going to be left to wallow for long, a murder victim turns up stabbed in a cottage in the Irish countryside. And theoretically it's not Cassie's problem anymore. But not only is the victim a dead ringer (ha!) for Cassie, the girl's papers identify her as "Lexie Madison"--the identity that Cassie herself invented for an undercover assignment that began and ended years ago. But identity theft aside, it's not every day that you get a victim who happens to look exactly like a local detective with undercover experience, I'm guessing. But once you get past that awfully convenient set-up, things get interesting fast.

Cassie's former mentor, a gung-ho type who's frothing at the mouth to investigate a murder from the inside out, has a plan: they'll tell the dead girl's friends that hey, false alarm, the stabbing wasn't fatal. Cassie will undergo a crash course in Lexie's daily life, mannerisms, and known associates. Cassie will become the dead girl, figure out how the chick ended up with the fake identity in the first place, and suss out who wanted her dead. Of course. Detective-on-the-case Sam doesn't want Cassie to take the risk of a) pretending to be someone who generates stabby ill will; or b) putting herself in the position of becoming Lexie Madison a second time--'cause what if the killer was someone holding a grudge against Cassie's iteration of Lexie, and not the impostor's? However, in the grand tradition of mild-mannered boyfriend characters everywhere, Sam's objections are quashed pretty quickly, and Cassie agrees to go undercover as Lexie.

The most difficult part of the transition is that Lexie had been living with a small,extremely close group of friends from her literature PhD program. Because there's a good chance that one of them is the killer, none of them can know what Cassie's up to. So, much of the novel is Cassie assimilating into this tight-knit group--no small task when the group (three guys and two girls) is so codependent that menstrual calendars aren't even secret. It involves a good bit of disbelief suspension, but it's interesting to watch Cassie straddle her duties as a cop with her devotion to melding into Lexie's life, and becoming caught up in the quirks and appealing (if odd) structure of Lexie's life with this crew. At the same time, Cassie needs to figure out how the girl ended up with the Lexie Madison identity at all. So it's one big ball of potential clusterfuck. Cassie knows it, and starts caring less. The reader knows it, and that's what keeps the tension going throughout.

As with In the Woods, what French lacks in plausibility, she makes up for with good characters and solid writing. Cassie makes a better (and much more reliable) narrator than Rob, and the sequel is both tighter overall, and structured better than the first. And I like the way French is creating her series: keeping the setting, the sensibility, and the periphery, while switching out the voices. Commercially, people like a protagonist they can get behind for ten books (and however many movies)--but literarily (is that a word?), it's much richer to create an arc this way. Although I definitely got attached to Cassie, I'm looking forward to the third book this summer, with yet another narrator.

Parts I liked:

"I don't tell people this, it's nobody's business, but the job is the nearest thing I've got to a religion. The detective's god is truth, and you don't get much higher or more ruthless than that. The sacrifice, at least in Murder and Undercover--and those were always the ones I wanted, why go chasing diluted versions when you could have the breathtaking full-on thing?--is anything or everything you've got, your time, your dreams, your marriage, your sanity, your life. Those are the coldest and most capricious gods of the lot, and if they accept you into their service they take not what you want to offer but what they choose."

"Have you noticed how easily the very young die? They make the best martyrs for any cause, the best soldiers. It's because they're held here so lightly: they haven't yet accumulated loves and responsibilities and commitments and all the things that tie us securely to this world. They can let go of it as easily and simply as lifting a finger. But as you get older, you begin to find things that are worth holding onto, forever. It changes the very fabric of you."