Tana French's The Likeness is an absolutely cracking summer read. I think it would wear well for the rest of the seasons, too, but any book that can keep my mind off the heat and humidity and inside the pages of a novel is going to receive my admiration and appreciation. And I didn't mind that the story revolves around the phenomenon of doppelgängers either. I've had a long fascination with the idea of there being someone somewhere in the world whose face is the twin of another. Do you think it's true? It's certainly been the topic of many books (Josephine Tey's Brat Farrar, Mary Stewart's The Ivy Tree and more recently Petra Hammesfahr's The Lie to name a few). Tana French's novel adds a new spin to an old story, however, as this isn't a case simply of one person taking on the persona of another for financial or other gain. This time there's murder involved, and a murder that isn't being covered up but one that's being investigated by a detective. An undercover detective no less.
When I read French's first novel, In the Woods, it was a near perfect reading experience for me. I wondered if she could possibly improve on a book that won multiple awards. She certainly met (maybe even topped) my expectations this time around. Some writers just have a knack for pulling you into a story and not letting you go until the final page and then leaving you a little bereft when you've finished. Tana French has that knack. The Likeness has a slowish start, but I was always interested in the characters, and somewhere along the way the world around me fell away and I was there, in Whitethorn House with Cassie Maddox.
Tana French is a little unconventional in how she writes her mysteries, though her books are much more than simple whodunits. In the Woods involved two detectives, Rob Ryan and his partner Cassie Maddox, working on a murder case that nearly took over their lives and ruined an almost perfect friendship. Rather than picking up the story where she left off, French takes one of the characters in the novel and spins a new story about her. In this case, the character of Cassie Maddox takes center stage. After 'Operation Vestal' nearly wrecked her, Cassie moved from the Murder Squad to Domestic Violence where life would be 'calmer'. A nice nine to five job in proper business clothes, but no nightmares.
I'm not entirely correct in saying this is Cassie's story. Cassie is quick to point out that this is Lexie Madison's story. And it's best to be clear that Lexie Madison never actually existed. She was an assumed identity made up by Cassie and Frank Mackey for an undercover job at the University College of Dublin where she infiltrated a drug ring. After the operation ended Lexie was more or less put to rest and forgotten. Years later a body turns up in a ruined Famine cottage out in the middle of a field with an ID of Lexie Madison and the face of Cassie Maddox. Frank Mackey, Cassie's former boss, can be alternately acerbic in his comments or a sweet talker depending on what he wants and how best he can achieve his ends. It doesn't take too much cajoling to talk Cassie into resuming her undercover role as Lexie Madison and pick up Lexie's life as if (almost nothing) had happened in order to work out who was most likely to have murdered her. Lexie has no known family and her friends were told she was in a coma due to serious wounds she received during a stabbing.
Lexie had been living with four other postgrad students; Daniel, Abby, Justin and Rafe, in an old Georgian manor house that has seen better days. Although once the seat of an aristocratic family it's now mostly just run down, but to the five who live there it's a sort of sanctuary from an inhospitable world. The group is a curious and eccentric mix, each with some dark secret in their past they are unwilling to talk about, yet they form a close, if unlikely, family. Nearly always in each other's company, Cassie/Lexie will return to their midst with a wire planted under her shirt. It's an audacious and dangerous plan to find a murderer, and Mackey's criticized for going through with it just because he can. Really there's more than one mystery here--discovering who this woman who called herself Lexie Madison was and just what or who she was running from and ultimately who murdered her.
The four friends have a symbiotic relationship with each other. They're the sort of friends who finish each other's sentences and know what the other is thinking. And it's all to the exclusion of everyone else in the English Department at Trinity. They are each other's family. As weird as the detectives think it is (and maybe the other students and the residents of the little village where they live as well), there is something comforting in the situation as well, and the lines between reality, Cassie's reality, and the investigation become blurred. The four initially tiptoe around Lexie, but she is quickly accepted back into the fold, and Cassie falls into the rhythms of the household, perhaps to her own detriment. French is talented when it comes to offering psychological insight into the whys and wherefores of the characters' behavior.
I thoroughly enjoyed The Likeness. There is a catch, however. (There's always a catch isn't there?). This is a novel best read with the knowledge going into it that it might require a certain amount of suspension of disbelief. I'm entirely willing to give an author leeway, if she's a good storyteller. And Tana French is a good storyteller. She's not only good at story, but her prose is smooth and elegant and her characters are fully formed, too. But what are the chances that Cassie Maddox might come across not only someone who looks so much like herself that they could pass as twins, that she would have taken on a persona that Cassie had once used, and that Cassie could walk amongst her most intimate friends and convince them she was Lexie. This is the beauty of fiction, though. Who knows, maybe it could happen. I'm willing to give Tana French the benefit of the doubt.
Tana French's newest novel, Faithul Place is already on my nightstand and I'm already caught up in Frank Mackey's story now. I'll let you know how things turn out.