The Likeness

The Likeness is an amazing follow up to Tana French's first book In the Woods. The story follows Detective Cassie Maddox, picking up six months after we left off with her in In the Woods. The premise of The Likeness is a little hard to grasp. A girl is found murdered who just happens to be Cassie's doppelganger and also happens to have been using an identity that Cassie herself had created years ago while working undercover. When the crime scene turns up little to no evidence of what happened, Cassie agrees to go undercover, stepping into Lexie Madison's life and living amongst her four closest friends in an attempt to uncover what happened to Lexie the night of her death. However, despite this believability factor, French managed to craft a completely engrossing story that I wasn't able to put down until the last page, much like her debut novel.

Cassie takes on the life of Lexie Madison after only a week of studying the girl's mannerisms and interactions with her four housemates. Upon moving to Whitethorn House, she rapidly conforms into Lexie's persona, leaving the others to believe that she is the same person. As the story progresses, we see more and more that something is off with this group. They constantly breach the boundaries of a conventional friendship, being so closely tied to one another that it seems inevitable that they are hiding something. This is not a fact-paced murder mystery. The bulk of the novel is psychological while Cassie sinks deeper into Lexie's life, sometimes losing herself and her objectivity along the way, and her getting to know the other housemates better and learning how they think and act. French has some of the most well-written, rich characters in crime fiction. The development of these characters is not only fascinating to see, but it leaves you with a gut wrenching hole in you when the book is over because you feel as if you've lost someone in your own life that you were close with.

Although the book is not quickly paced, the intrigue is still high. Cassie has a couple slip ups, and with each one I was on the edge of my seat wondering how and if she would pull it off. She breaks protocol multiple times by hiding information from her superiors, partly because she wants to solve the case on her own, and partly because she developed a sense of protection for the others as she got closer to them. French has a masterful writing style and I love the chance to see into the minds of both the detectives and the suspects. This was a fantastic second novel and I already have Faithful Place ready to go as my next read!