She finds herself enjoying the lifestyle and the people she’s living with so much that she begins to protect some of their secrets from her boss. But instead of being overwhelmed by the precariousness of her situation, Cassie reacts in a way no one could have foreseen.

But they know that it will take only one little slip, one oddity out of character with the real Lexie, to expose Cassie to whomever killed Lexie.

When Cassie looks down at the dead woman, she immediately knows why Sam called her there: the victim could be Cassie’s identical twin.Īnd that gives Frank Mackey, Cassies former undercover boss, an idea: What if they pretend that the victim somehow survived long enough to make it to the hospital? What if a few days later, the “dead girl” comes home to live with the people she lives with and claims that she doesn’t remember a thing about the incident that nearly killed her? What if the other four people living in the house fall for the charade long enough for Cassie and Frank to figure out which one of the four murdered the dead woman? And what if they don’t?Įven Cassie and Frank are a bit surprised when she seems to have successfully passed herself off as the dead Lexie. But now, just six months after leaving the squad, Cassie has been called to the scene of a murder by her boyfriend Detective Sam O’Neill, who is still a member of the Murder Squad. Now what I find most unbelievable is how much I ended up loving this novel and its characters…all of them.ĭetective Cassie Maddox thought she was forever finished with murder investigations after what happened to her on her last one. That shift in emphasis let me finally suspend my disbelief long enough to lose myself in The Likeness for the first time. About a dozen pages later, I realized that French had finally quit trying to convince me that such an investigation really could happen, and was ready to tell me the rest of the story. And that’s when something funny happened. After two false starts during which I frustrated myself for a month, I finally put the book aside at page 140 for almost three months before finally picking it up again. There was simply no way that I could ever convince myself that an undercover cop could investigate a murder by moving into the victim’s home - especially when the home’s other four residents knew the victim so intimately - and pretending to be that dead woman.

Almost from the beginning of the book, I found its basic premise to be implausible, if not impossible. I don’t think I’ve ever reacted to a crime novel before the way that I reacted to Tana French’s The Likeness (the second book in the author’s Dublin Murder Squad series).

The likeness tana french review