Books: The Likeness By Tana French (2009)

The Likeness is Irish author Tana French’s follow-up to her debut bestseller, In the Woods. While I actually think this is a better novel, it still seems a bit overlong and slow. 

It’s been six months since the events of the previous book and Detective Cassie Maddox is still trying to recover and to put her life right. She has moved out of Murder Squad into the Domestic Violence, and is hoping that this switch will make her life quieter and make her burgeoning relationship with Detective Sam O'Neill go a bit smoother –even if she can’t fully make a commitment to him or her new career.

But in the end, it’s Sam who gets her back involved in a murder case, one involving the stabbing death of a female college student. And while she’s puzzled at first why Sam called her, it becomes clear to Cassie when she sees the girl, her past is about to return in a most unwelcome sort of way. The young dead women’s name is Lexie Madison, which turns out to be a name Cassie used when she was an undercover cop years before joining the Murder Squad. Plus she also bears a striking resemblance to Maddox.

With no leads, no suspects, and no clue to Lexie's real identity, Cassie's old undercover boss, Frank Mackey, spots the opportunity of a lifetime. They can say that the stab wound wasn't fatal and send Cassie undercover in her place to find out information that the police never would and to tempt the killer out of hiding. At first Cassie thinks the idea is crazy, but she is seduced by the prospect of working on a murder investigation again and by the idea of assuming the victim's identity as a graduate student with a cozy group of friends.

As she is drawn into Lexie's world, Cassie realizes that the girl's secrets run deeper than anyone imagined. Her friends are becoming suspicious, Sam has discovered a generations-old feud involving the old house the students live in, and Frank is starting to suspect that Cassie's growing emotional involvement could put the whole investigation at risk.

The first part of the book, and arguably the slowest chunk, details Cassie preparing to go undercover at Whitethorn House, a manor outside Dublin and close to town called Glenskehy (and in most procedural shows these days would be quickly taken care of in a montage scene). The folks who live around the manor and the town don’t like the five people who’ve taken up residence there:  paternal Daniel (who inherited the house from his uncle, who equally was not liked by the folks), handsome Rafe, the oddball Abby, and easily rattled Justin. 

While the books plays out like an elongated episode of the Sarah Michelle Geller series The Ringer married with today’s TV procedural with a dash of Agatha Christie (every one of the four have stereotypical quirks and dark past, they’re also generally unlikeable as well, which is a Christie cliché) added for good measure, it’s dull pace undermines the plot –which while hyper-realistic, still stretches the credibility factor. While French appears to focus more on character development over plot manipulation (there is certainly no surprises here), it could’ve been more successful if The Likeness was a tighter ship –mostly the first hundred pages could’ve been trimmed to a few chapters. 

Still, her prose is strong and you end up liking Cassie more than In the Woods. Her dialogue is strong, and very realistic (I like characters who act like everyday folks instead speaking and doing things like they are characters in a book) and that really saves this book.

Books: In The Woods By Tana French (2007)

I like old fashion whodunits, especially ones set in small towns and villages. Part of the appeal, I guess, is that as cliché as it may seem, there is always an underbelly to small town life, a darkness that is usually covered up or ignored by the folks that live within its limits.

That was part of the appeal for me to finally get around to Irish author Tana French’s debut 2007 novel In the Woods. 

“As dusk approaches a small Dublin suburb in the summer of 1984, mothers begin to call their children home. But on this warm evening, three children do not return from the dark and silent woods. When the police arrive, they find only one of the children gripping a tree trunk in terror, wearing blood-filled sneakers, and unable to recall a single detail of the previous hours. 

“Twenty years later, the found boy, Adam Rob Ryan (and now using his middle name), is a detective on the Dublin Murder Squad and keeps his past a secret. But when a twelve-year-old girl is found murdered in the same woods, he and Detective Cassie Maddox—his partner and closest friend—find themselves investigating a case chillingly similar to the previous unsolved mystery. Now, with only snippets of long-buried memories to guide him, Ryan has the chance to uncover both the mystery of the case before him and that of his own shadowy past.”

There is a lot of darkness here, and French’s prose is strong, descriptive and well executed. Rob and Cassie are fully realized, three dimensional humans who feel familiar, yet remain cagey and eccentric. But the book also features an unreliable narrator, ("What I am telling you, before you begin my story, is this - two things: I crave truth. And I lie") which takes getting used to. 

Most of the time, I felt that Rob’s memory lapses of his childhood (especially since he tells the reader repeatedly he has excellent recollection of things) was a red herring, but at least by the books end, we get some revelation into what happened in 1984. But that turned out be more of a disappointing “maguffin” as the books murder mystery (with its lurid, Law & Order, ripped from the headlines ending) took over the last 60 pages or so of the novel. Plus, by then, Rob had become an annoying, very whiny, very pedantic, inept detective. 

Plus, why does no one recognize him? Sure he and his family moved away from Knocknaree, and he’s 32 instead of 12, and has changed, but he could’ve not changed that much where the folks (99% whom still live there) would not catch on (which also begs the question of how even his commanding officer, an stereotypical Irish cop who shouts and hates complicated things like a murder that has shades of gray versus the good old black and white, would not know his background either) that Rob Ryan was indeed Adam Ryan. 

I agree that book is gorgeously written, and the characters are very well crafted and sympathetic, but I felt cheated in the end. I dislike authors who do this because there is no indication that this was the start of a new series –at least in 2007- when it was released State side.  I’m guessing in her follow up novel, The Likeness, we get another look into Rob’s past. But from what I read, it focuses on Cassie mostly.