Reread: "The Likeness" by Tana French

 

The Likeness by Tana French
Released 2008 via Penguin
★★★★★

Here's the thing that sold me on Tana French's Dublin Murder Squad series: a different character headlines each book. There are recurring characters, of course (a murder squad, and the other squads in its orbit, can only be so large), but different protagonists. You'd think this wouldn't make so much of a difference, or that it would have its downsides (not getting to know the protagonist as well over the course of a series?), but to me, what it means is possibility: we don't get ever more convoluted will-they-won't-they office romances strung out over three or twelve or twenty books, because those romances can happen—or not—in the course of one or two books, from one or two perspectives. It's possible for the main character to end up leaving the murder squad permanently. To leave law enforcement permanently. It's possible for her, or him, to die at the end of the book.

The Likeness, the second book in the series, sung out to me when I first read it in 2019. It's the setting, I think: Cassie is assigned, through a series of improbable events, to go undercover in student digs, of a sort: an old manor house currently home to five PhD students, one of whom is now dead—and whom Cassie will be impersonating. The book was partially inspired by The Secret History, which I didn't love (too high on the dysfunction scale), but there's something so compelling about taking a close-knit group of friends, a chosen family, and then peeling back the layers to see how much of what works about their unconventional setup can truly stand up to time, to stress, to the reality of the world around them. I'm with Cassie: there are moments in the house when I too would desperately want to sink into that world, to stay.

This was a reread for 2023—again, I read it first in 2019. I'd wanted to reread for a while, but it was Maureen Johnson's Nine Liars that tipped me over (another house full of chosen family, another murder). Three or four years made for the best sort of reread: I could look forward to certain details (when Cassie learns the truth of the house's ownership; the big climactic scene when much, though not all, is revealed) without remembering minor things like...say...Lexie's backstory, or who wielded the knife, or where the various characters end up at the end of the book. In other words, I remembered enough to pick up on details and nuance that I didn't get the first time, but I'd forgotten enough that I stayed enthralled beginning to end.

I do recommend starting with the first book in the series, but...well. I'm looking forward to a few years from now, when I've forgotten enough key details of The Likeness to pick it up again.