The Likeness: A Novel

4.3 4.3 out of 5 stars | 20,477 ratings

Price: 27

Last update: 01-29-2025


About this item

New York Times best-selling author Tana French, author of the forthcoming novel The Searcher, is “[T]he most important crime novelist to emerge in the past 10 years” (The Washington Post) and “[I]nspires cultic devotion in readers” (The New Yorker).

“Required reading for anyone who appreciates tough, unflinching intelligence and ingenious plotting.” (The New York Times)

Now airing as a Starz series.

In the “[C]ompellingˮ (The Boston Globe) and “[P]itch perfectˮ (Entertainment Weekly) follow-up to Tana French’s runaway best seller In the Woods, Cassie Maddox has transferred out of the Dublin Murder Squad - until an urgent telephone call brings her back to an eerie crime scene.

The victim looks exactly like Cassie and carries ID identifying herself as Alexandra Madison, an alias Cassie once used as an undercover cop. Suddenly, Cassie is back undercover, to find out not only who killed this young woman, but, more importantly, who she was.

The Likeness is a supremely suspenseful story exploring the nature of identity and belonging.


Top reviews from the United States

  • Bonnie Brody
    5.0 out of 5 stars More Than a Mystery - Brilliant
    Reviewed in the United States on August 6, 2010
    The Likeness: A Novel by Tana French is a gorgeous book. It is beautifully written and guaranteed to give the reader goose flesh. It can easily be called a mystery but it is much more than that because in this author's hands it becomes a study of identity, being, and the core essence of who we truly are.

    I had just finished reading Faithful Place: A Novel when I started The Likeness and I don't think that Tana French's books need to be read in any particular order. However, I think it would be more fun had I read The Likeness first because I would have been more familiar with the character of Frank Mackey.

    The Likeness starts out with the stabbing and murder of a young graduate student who looks enough like Detective Cassie Maddox to be her twin. The dead girl's name is Lexie Madison and she was living with four other graduate students from Trinity College near Dublin. Frank Mackey is a detective in the murder division and is Cassie Maddox's boss. He decides, along with Cassie, that they will begin 'Project Mirror' and pretend that Lexie Madison is not dead, that she survived the stabbing and was merely in a coma. Cassie will go undercover as Lexie and live with the four other roommates until she can identify the killer. What makes this even more interesting is that the name 'Lexie Madison' is the name of one of Cassie Maddox's past aliases when she used to work undercover. I know, it sounds weird. Cassie used to be Lexie. Lexie is now dead and Cassie is playing the role of Lexie again. But that's how it is. It's a game of identity, undercover, out of the shadows and into the woods. It's about what is what and who is who - - really.

    While this is a mystery at its essence, it is more than what we usually consider a mystery. It is a mystery about the metaphors of life and identity. It is about killers and victims, cops and criminals, reality and fantasy. Who are we and are we really who and what we think we are? This all works because it is in the hands of a master author who loves words and uses them as smoothly as hand cream. She turns words over and over like leaves blowing in the wind. We see the seasons in her words because they are that changing, ephemeral and beautiful. They come alive and we are totally sucked in.

    This is a book for people who like to read and who appreciate a really good book. It is a book that I can't wait to pass on to my husband so that we can talk about it together. It is a book I won't forget, filled with characters who will live long in my mind.
  • Mark A. Boada
    4.0 out of 5 stars Compelling, if Flawed
    Reviewed in the United States on January 14, 2013
    First, the good stuff: What I appreciate most about Tana French's novels is her painstaking efforts to give her stories an accurate social historic context. In Broken Harbor, it's the aftermath of the burst bubble of the Irish economy and real estate market. In The Likeness, it's the transformation of Ireland from a backward, underdeveloped economy to boomtown, complete with Yuppies and pockets of ruritania that have been left behind.

    She's alsc quite skilled at the odd detail that reverberates, triggering internal monologues that illuminate her characters. And she creates fully fleshed, real characters with both likable and unlikable qualities, most of who earn our empathy (except for believable nonces, like Detective Quigley, a minor character who is a farcical nememsis of Frank Mackey)

    Finally, she creates compelling plots, who-dunnits that I find keep me turning pages late into the night.

    Now for the bad stuff. Occasionally, French's writing turns a shade of purple, overwitten and self-conscious, and it can get a bid tedious. Secondly -- and this bothered me the most in The Likeness -- her reliance on coincidence. I was disappointed that French didn't even attempt to provide a plausible explanation for how dead Lexi Madison managed to find undercover cop Lexi Madison's identity and then assume it in a way that could persuade the venerable Trinity University to admit her to its PhD program in English.

    Even as the plot was sweeping me along, I never quite fully suspended my disbelief on this point, and it got in the way of my enjoyment. I could accept the notion that Cassie Maddox and dead-Lexi could be dead-ringers for each other, as remote as the chance might be, and that by studying dead-Lexi's phone camera videos she could pick up on dead-Lexi's mannerisms. But it sent me over the edge of credulity to believe dead-Lexi could find Cassie's undercover alter ego. I wish French had offered some plausible explanation, and maybe it was implied somehow and I missed it, but I don't think so.

    It's a shame this otherwise clever and sensitive novel left me with a note of fundamental dissatisfaction.

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