Book Review: The Likeness

The Likeness by Tana French


To say this book is just a police procedural doesn’t do it justice. It’s a heavy tome in both length and depth, and will stick with me a long time. It takes place after the events of “In the Woods” and while you don’t have to have read that book, it would help. Rob Ryan was the main character in In the Woods, but he’s not really present in this book at all; it focuses entirely on Cassie.

The main relationship in this book is between Cassie and Lexy, the dead girl whose murder she’s investigating. Lexy is an enigma; even her name isn’t true, since she was murdered while using the stolen identity Cassie had invented for a previous undercover operation. Cassie is trying to find out who Lexy was, what enemies she had, and why she was murdered, while pretending to be who Lexy was. So it’s kind of trippy to think about: Cassie is pretending to have the personality of a person whose personality was created to fit a role. She’s like an understudy for a real-life part. While its implausible that two unrelated people would be close enough in appearance to be able to pass for the same person, it’s a conceit I’ll forgive for such an entrancing story that has the best elements of an unreliable narrator without resorting to tired tropes such as a narrator who’s an alcoholic or a liar.

The mood of this book is one of wistful nostalgia, like a beautiful afternoon of the last day before everything is destroyed. Cassie really enjoys Lexy’s life with Lexy’s housemates. They’re a found family of intellectual misfits in a conservative area that accepts only male+female+their children arrangements as valid household bonds. Lexy and her housemates love one another, and Cassie starts to love them too, wishing she could stay in that life forever, and resenting the real-world intrusions, such as the fact that her job makes her a lying viper in their midst. The more she learns about Lexy, the more she begins to realize that Lexy herself was a lying viper in their midst.

It’s rare that a book so firmly within a genre can also be so thematic and have such a cohesive mood, but at 22 hours, The Likeness has lots of time for a slow build. How much is Cassie like Lexy and where do they diverge? How much of what everyone believes about Lexy is true and how much of it is wishful thinking? The tension builds as housemates unravel from the weight of their secrets. And through it all, there’s this mood of the last halcyon days before destruction, heightened by their anachronistic Edith Wharton type life and details that recall happy times before one of the World Wars. It’s bittersweet, but the tragedy is so deeply foreshadowed that you have time to mourn before it happens. I kept thinking about this book for quite a while after I finished it. Highly recommend.




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