The Likeness by Tana French (2008 fiction)
This is a hypnotic read, a gripping murder mystery, an incredible yet irresistible story. Trinity College, Dublin, County Wicklow, Ireland’s neverending struggle for real freedom, all are sketched accurately as background to an undercover operation that skates over myriad difficulties. The main cast of five characters is sketched in excruciating adequacy, leaving the reader to fill in potential gaps. Then there is a supporting cast of detectives and policemen, problematic, uncertain, and challenging. French’s County Wicklow, immediately south of Dublin City, is a relatively undeveloped rural environment. There is a Big House, decrepit but still a symbol of centuries of oppression to the local peasantry. Its five occupants are unlikely but interesting individually and as a group. The plot places detective Cassie Maddox in their midst as a replacement for murder victim Lexie Madison. The police deny and conceal her death. Cassie is to become Lexie in order to solve the crime. There are outsiders, and she has regular communiques with her police handler, but the plot becomes her absorption into the community and her acceptance. I thought that this situation was impossibly difficult, but French conjures up a marvelous inexorable tidal development of factual and personal relationships that carried me for 500 glorious pages.
Reviewed by Martin Waldron
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