Book review: The Likeness by Tana French

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The Likeness by Tana French

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


In an effort to discover a killer, Detective Cassie Maddox is put undercover after a young woman who bears her a stunning resemblance is discovered murdered. Said young woman was known as Alexandra Madison, or Lexie, the alias Cassie used in a drug sting operation some years prior. So who is she? And why was she stabbed and left to die in a tumbledown crofter's cottage on a remote country lane?

Pleading amnesia as a result of the attack to cover any gaps in knowledge, Cassie takes Lexie's place in a house shared by four other young people. She begins to live Lexie's life: going to school, working on the house, fixing dinner, talking with her roommates -- a life so ordinary and comfortable that Cassie's boundaries start to blur.

I thought about her differently that night. Before, she had been an invader or a dare, always something that set my back stiffening and my adrenalin racing. But I was the one who had flashed into her life out of nowhere...I was the dare she had taken, years before the flip side of the coin landed in front of me. The moon spun slowly across the sky and I thought of my face blue-gray and empty on steel in the morgue, the long rush and clang of the drawer shutting her into the dark, alone. I imagined her sitting on this same bit of wall on other, lost nights, and I felt so warm and so solid, firm moving flesh overlaid on her faint silvery imprint, it almost broke my heart. I wanted to tell her things she should have known, how her tutorial group had coped with Beowulf and what the guys had made for dinner, what the sky looked like tonight; things I was keeping for her.

Tana French takes us deep into Cassie's psyche, and by extension into Lexie's, with heartbreaking prose and keen observation. Her phrasing is so sharp it cuts. She imbues her characters with grit, determination, bravado, so much sheer humanity...even the minor players have dimension. She gradually builds the tension and darkens the atmosphere -- Lexie's world isn't so safe after all -- but leaves us guessing about the killer until the very end. And even then, are we really sure what happened?

Well done. Very well done.

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