The Likeness: Tana French

The Likeness (2008) is the sequel to Tana French’s debut novel, In the Woods. That book featured two detectives in the Murder Squad in Dublin, Ireland, Rob Ryan and Cassie Maddox. In The Likeness, Cassie is now working in Domestic Violence at police headquarters, but a unique opportunity arises for her to go undercover. A woman bearing the identification of Lexie Madison is found dead; the woman cannot be Lexie Madison because that was an invented identity that Cassie used when she worked in the Undercover division. The woman is Cassie's double, and Cassie agrees to take her place at her residence, where she lived with four other undergraduates. A complex premise and one that at times was hard to accept.

I like the structure of the Dublin Murder Squad series. Rob Ryan and Cassie are the two main characters in the first novel. Only Cassie is featured in The Likeness (book 2), and she is working primarily with Frank Mackey of Undercover. In the next book, another detective from book 2 is featured. And so on. In The Likeness, there are references back to the previous case, but knowledge of that book is not necessary to enjoy this one.

I read this book almost a year ago, but I still remember how much I liked it. I felt like the story strained my disbelief a bit, but it was so suspenseful and well-written that I was pulled into it. I liked the characters, and that is helpful in this type of book where you spend so much time with them.

The Likeness does have elements I usually dislike. I don't care for really long books. In the edition I read, this one is 466 pages. Long but not atrociously long. I do think it could have been pared down a little, but I enjoyed every page of it.

I have never cared for stories about undercover assignments, even on TV or in films. They are too stressful for me and too many things can go wrong. This one had the extra added stress that Cassie was pretending to be someone that her housemates had been living with for months, whom they interacted with everyday. Yet I still enjoyed the story ...

What I do like about the two books I have read so far in this series is that the character exploration is just as important as solving the mystery. Yes, I cared who did it, but that isn't what kept me reading. I liked all the characters so well, even though they were young, immature, and had their faults, that I did not want any of them to be the culprit.

Cassie narrates this story which makes it even more personal and emotional. Here is a quote:

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 the truth, and you don't get much higher or much 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 oldest 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.

Good quote from the review at The New Yorker:

Most crime fiction is diverting; French’s is consuming. A bit of the spell it casts can be attributed to the genre’s usual devices—the tempting conundrum, the red herrings, the slices of low and high life—but French is also hunting bigger game. In her books, the search for the killer becomes entangled with a search for self. In most crime fiction, the central mystery is: Who is the murderer? In French’s novels, it’s: Who is the detective?

See other views by Moira at Clothes in Books and John Grant at Goodreads.


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Publisher: Penguin Books, 2009 (orig. publ. 2008)
Length:  466 pages
Format:  Trade paperback
Series:   Dublin Murder Squad, #2
Setting:  Dublin, Ireland
Genre:   Mystery