That Lexie was a free spirit adds to her allure, particularly as Cassie struggles with Frank, who has bumped aside her boyfriend Sam as the lead detective on the case. Her projection of Lexie onto herself–Lexie becomes a companion spirit whose history and personality she believes are intertwined with her own by fate–provides relief from her post-Murder squad despair.
However, this element of genre-bending fantasy in The Likeness pays off with suspense (will Cassie’s identity be discovered by alpha-member Daniel and the others in the group?) and the exploration of character, both Cassie’s and Lexie’s. The idea of Cassie playing Lexie among those who lived with her is so improbable it is preposterous. Not surprisingly, Cassie is ripe for a change, and it comes when her former boss, legendary undercover cop Frank Mackey, offers her a new undercover assignment, this time as her doppelganger, Lexie Madison, a resident of Whitethorn who was stabbed and found dead in a broke down cottage near Whitethorn. ”Target shooting was the only thing I had found that worked the jitters out of me.” She is “so freaked out” she has to visit the police firing range first thing each day.
The trauma she experienced in Undercover and later on the Murder squad have left her inervated with “standard-issue trauma stuff.” First, she was stabbed by the university meth dealer whom she was investigating under the fictitious identity, Alexandra Madison, and in Murder she served on the notorious Operational Vestal, a “head-wrecker” that drove her away from the Murder squad. However, the novel is slow to start, and by its end, after chapters of acrimony among the house’s residents aggravated by Cassie’s deconstruction of their micro-society, the story loses its vitality and ends unconvincingly.Īt the beginning of the story Cassie is working a desk job in Domestic Violence. The complementary descriptions of the fecund Wicklow countryside and psychological tangles of the novel’s characters–both the group and undercover detective Cassie Maddox struggle with problematic identities–make for a read that is striking and memorable. The five graduate students, who along with Detective Cassie Maddox, are at the center of the story, form a cult-like group while living in Whitethorn, an Edwardian mansion that riles the local Irish for its ties to English suppression. At its best The Likeness by Tana French is a richly described mystery that offers both suspense and a memorable group of troubled personalities.
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