The Likeness

Title: The Likeness

Author: Tana French

Publisher: Penguin Books, 2008

Pages: 492

Genre: Mystery

In the “compellingˮ (The Boston Globe) and “pitch perfectˮ (Entertainment Weekly) follow-up to Tana French’s runaway bestseller In the Woods, itʼs six months later and Cassie Maddox has transferred out of the Dublin Murder Squad with no plans to go back—until an urgent telephone call summons her to a grisly crime scene. The victim looks exactly like Cassie and carries ID identifying herself as Alexandra Madison, an alias Cassie once used as an undercover cop. Cassie must discover not only who killed this girl, but, more important, who was this girl?

I love procedurals. I did not know that that was a term until recently, but I’m a fan of them. Movies, TV shows, and of course, books. I love to try to work my way through the evidence with the detectives and see if I can solve these crimes first. I’m sure a lot of you do as well, that’s why the movies, TV shows, and books are so wildly popular and prolific. This book was no exception.

But it went beyond a mere procedural or murder mystery. When detectives find the young victim who looks like Cassie, who was using an old undercover alias, they approach Cassie about stepping into this girl’s life. The level of manipulation that the detectives reach to undertake this whole operation was unconscionable. They actually cover up the fact that the girl is dead in order to allow Cassie to step into her life. I can’t even fathom the lack of empathy required to do that to someone, or the lack of respect for the dead.

I’ve never truly thought about what it would do to a person to pretend to be someone else. The ways in which Cassie became Alexandra were frightening. She truly began caring for these people who were all suspects of her murder in a way. She lied for them, she nearly ruined her real life for them, and the whole time she knew that they could have been the murderers. But how do you not fall in love with people when you’re trying to live the life of a woman who loved them? I don’t know that I could do it. Keep myself from becoming emotionally attached.

When Cassie was learning about Alexandra’s life, and specifically her 5 roommates, she has a phone full of photos and videos to help her. Through these snippets, Cassie falls in love with the idea of what Alexandra’s life with those people was like. She fell in love with the idea of these 5 people. It reminded me a lot of how we filter our real life for social media. It also reminded me of how at the beginning of a relationship we scroll through the other person’s social media and build up this idea of what their life has been like, and the kind of person we think they are. We fall in love with that version of the person that we have built from our interactions coupled with that idyllically filtered social media life. And usually, after a few months, we are greeted with the reality that whatever we thought they were is often not the case. Cassie does this, and it backfires on her in a most dangerous way. Makes me glad all I ever got out of falling for made up versions of people were bad breakups!

Overall, this book was excellent. I read In the Woods a few years ago on a plane and loved it. Then I read The Secret Place a year or two after that, and loved it. Tana French does not disappoint, people.

Rating: 4.5/5