Six months after the events of In the Woods, Detective Cassie Maddox is still trying to recover. She’s transferred out of the murder squad and started a relationship with Detective Sam O’Neill, but she’s too badly shaken to make a commitment to him or to her career. Then Sam calls her to the scene of his new case: a young woman found stabbed to death in a small town outside Dublin. The dead girl’s ID says her name is Lexie Madison – the identity Cassie used years ago as an undercover detective – and she looks exactly like Cassie.
With no leads, no suspects, and no clue to Lexie’s real identity, Cassie’s old undercover boss, Frank Mackey, spots the opportunity of a lifetime. They can say that the stab wound wasn’t fatal and send Cassie undercover in her place to find out information that the police never would and to tempt the killer out of hiding. At first Cassie thinks the idea is crazy, but she is seduced by the prospect of working on a murder investigation again and by the idea of assuming the victim’s identity as a graduate student with a cozy group of friends.
As she is drawn into Lexie’s world, Cassie realizes that the girl’s secrets run deeper than anyone imagined. Her friends are becoming suspicious, Sam has discovered a generations-old feud involving the old house the students lived in, and Frank is starting to suspect that Cassie’s growing emotional involvement could put the whole investigation at risk. Another gripping psychological thriller featuring the headstrong protagonist we’ve come to love, from an author who has proven that she can deliver.
Readers expecting a light distracting English/Irish mystery might be a bit disappointed in this book. I found myself reading and rereading passages to reassure myself that I knew what events were occurring and why. This did not detract from the book's essential story but did make it more than light reading. Tana French's style of writing is unique to her in its intensity and her fascination with developing characters. After reading her first book, In the Woods, and The Likeness, I will need a romp with a few English tea-drinking murderers who are not complex and have nothing to hide, before I tackle her next book. But I am certain of one thing…I will tackle it! (Reviewed by Patty Magyar).
The New York Times - Janet Maslin
Ms. French resists genre conventions defiantly enough to have written a long, rambling book, one that is more interested in character revelations than in “Aha!” moments about the plot. She could have achieved the same effects much more succinctly in a more tightly edited version of this same story. But Cassie herself remains a strong enough character to sustain interest, even if many of her observations about Whitethorn have a vague, hazy quality. All she needs is a sparring match with Frank, and Cassie quickly returns to the land of the living — and to the subtle demands of her perilous, suspenseful masquerade.
Entertainment Weekly - Kate Ward
Imagine The Parent Trap meets The Departed, and you've got The Likeness, Tana French's nearly pitch-perfect follow-up to her 2007 debut thriller, In the Woods. Grade A.
Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Readers looking for a new name in psychological suspense need look no further than this powerful new Irish voice.
Library Journal
French creates remarkably complex characters while gradually unpeeling the layers of her story in this rich and insightful psychological thriller. A stunner.
Kirkus Reviews
Police procedures, psychological thrills and gothic romance beautifully woven into one stunning story.
Recent Reader Reviews
Rated of 5
by Betsey Van Horn Transcends genre--exquisite As in her first novel, In the Woods, Tana French has created another sensuous, lyrical, haunting, suspenseful story. Although it is considered a mystery, it is much much more than that. It is a story of identity in all its literal and metaphorical... Read More
Doppelgangers
When Cassie sees a woman lying stabbed to death who looks
exactly like her, with an ID that matches the identity she
used for years as an undercover detective, it seems clear
that she is looking at her own doppelganger.
The dictionary describes a doppelganger (or
doubleganger, from the German for 'doublegoer' or
lookalike) as a ghostly double or counterpart of a
living person. In the vernacular the term has come to be
used more loosely to describe any sort of double.
The doppelgangers of folklore are said to have no
shadows or reflection (similar in some ways to
vampires). They are inevitably bad news, being either
malicious or a bad omen, often heralding death or a
serious illness.
Doppelgangers appear quite frequently in fiction. R.
L. Stevenson's Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll and Mr.
Hyde and Oscar Wilde's Picture of Dorian Grey
being...
When Eugenie Davies is killed by a driver on a quiet London street, her death is clearly no accident. Someone struck her with a car and then deliberately ran over her body before driving off, leaving nothing behind but questions.
In the debut crime novel from the Booker-winning author, a Dublin pathologist follows the corpse of a mysterious woman into the heart of
a conspiracy among the city’s high Catholic society
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Stranger than fiction, blending tragedy and farce, How to Create the Perfect Wife is an engrossing tale of the radicalism, and deep contradictions, at the heart of the Enlightenment.
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U.S. ebook sales up in 2012, but rate of growth is slowing(May 16 2013) In 2012, trade book sales (i.e. non academic book sales) rose 6.9%, to $15.049 billion, and e-book sales continued to grow, although the rate of growth...
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(912 words).
The New York Times - Janet Maslin
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by Betsey Van Horn
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