Special thriller section: 'The Likeness'

A detective assumes the identity of her look-alike in new summer sizzler

By Traci Macnamara, Special to the Rocky

Published July 10, 2008 at 7 p.m.

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Photo by David Pearse

Author Tana French follows her best-selling debut novel, "Into the Woods," with a strong, suspenseful sequel, "The Likeness."

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Tana French's new book is built upon a preposterous assumption: that the detective investigating a murder looks exactly like the victim. The astonishing thing is that in spite of such an improbable conceit, the story still works.

All credit is due to French's writing: Suspenseful but not overly enigmatic, it teases readers at every turn of the plot.

The Likeness is a riveting crime tale that also succeeds in exploring meaningful themes, such as identity, family and love. Even those who don't normally read thrillers will easily be drawn into its grip.

The story is the sequel to French's best-selling debut novel, Into the Woods, a tale that starred detective Cassie Maddox as a funny, likable young woman who considers the main food groups to be "chocolate biscuits, smokes, ground coffee and . . . wine." That book became a national best-seller and was a finalist for the Mystery Writers of America's Edgar Award.

The Likeness continues the series readers will love for its lively characters and international flair.

At the story's beginning, Maddox is still recovering from the events of In the Woods. She remains shaken from the child murder case she worked on and has transferred out of the murder division to work with Dublin's more innocuous domestic violence cases instead.

But Cassie's break from the Murder Squad doesn't last long. When a woman named Lexie Madison is found stabbed to death in a small town outside of Dublin, Cassie is called to the scene. The dead girl not only looks as if she could be Cassie's identical twin, but she is also using a name Cassie herself had used years earlier as an undercover detective.

When her old boss, Frank Mackey, takes control of the investigation, Cassie is coaxed into assuming the identity of the murdered woman, and the investigation is under way.

Mackey concocts a brilliant scheme called Operation Mirror to crack a case that begins with no suspects, no leads and no clue to Lexie's actual identity. His plan is to say that the dead woman's stab wounds weren't fatal and to send Cassie right back into the life of Lexie Madison, where she might be able to trick the killer out of hiding.

The challenge is tempting enough for Cassie to take it, reasoning that this case is different from the other "knock-down-drag-out battles of wits" she has worked before. "This was the first time I had felt like my real opponent wasn't the murderer but the victim: defiant, clenching her secrets white-knuckle tight, and evenly, perfectly matched against me in every way, too close to call."

Operation Mirror requires Cassie to take up Lexie Madison's role at Whitethorn House, an old mansion where she lived with four other graduate students. The students' lives are eerily intertwined, and any one of them could be the murderer. Cassie makes her entrance into the house as Lexie Madison with a few important differences - she has a surveillance microphone wrapped into her fake bandages and keeps a handgun at her side when she sleeps.

In the process of unraveling the case, she finds that the victim's true identity is intimately linked to her own. As she says: "This is Lexie Madison's story, not mine. I'd love to tell you one without getting into the other, but it doesn't work that way."

Both this book's heroine and its victim have secrets lurking in their closets. Those secrets are what ultimately killed Lexie Madison, and in her undercover work, Cassie is in danger of reaching a similar end.

As the book unfolds, Cassie develops a romantic interest, and that subplot nicely balances the whodunit aspects of the story.

There's no need to have read French's first book to enjoy this one. This book's plot is independent of its predecessor, and French drops enough hints to give readers an understanding of what happened before.

My only quibble is that, despite being guided through this story by a smart and adventurous narrator, the protagonist's voice is annoyingly chatty at times. Cassie swears, starts sentences in mid-thought, and uses adjectives such as "craptacular." This character's saving grace is that she does these things consistently and somehow remains endearing from beginning to end.

Suspense writing is clearly French's forte. Rather than employing cliff-hanger tactics, such as ending chapters with striking discoveries, French relies on more delicate revelations to engage readers all along. When Cassie says, "All the best undercovers have a dark thread woven into them, somewhere," readers will be left wondering how the statement applies to her.

With such clever subtleties, French builds momentum, and now she's on a roll.

Will there be a sequel?

"I haven't ruled out coming back to Cassie . . . or Rob Ryan from In the Woods," French says in a press release. "I'm not done with either of them yet!"

This book will leave readers eagerly awaiting the next.

Traci J. Macnamara is a freelance writer whose work has appeared in national magazines, journals and books. She lives in Vail.

The Likeness

* By Tana French. Viking, 466 pages, $24.95.

* Grade: A-

The show goes on

French trained as an actress at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland, where she lives. "For years, my job as an actor was to create a character . . . and spend hours a day operating completely from her perspective, bringing an audience into her world," she says in a press release. As a writer, "I play my narrator on paper, rather than on stage."

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