April 6, 2021

I picked up my husband from the airport last night. Yay! He's back. I didn't get enough sleep to make up for my lack of sleep the night before. Fuzzy head. The beginning of this week is a lot lighter than most of my weeks for the past 1,000,000 years. It's a weird feeling, but I probably need a break to slow down and reassess my life. Take a rest from the persistent drumbeat of Onwards.  

BLog Time! **SPOILERS**

French, Tana – THE LIKENESS

Published: 2008

Read: 4/2021

The Likeness is the second novel in French’s Dublin Murder Squad series. This time, we see through the eyes of Detective Cassie Maddox. She’s in DV (off the Murder Squad) after the events in In The Woods when a body is discovered of a woman who looks exactly like her. Her old boss in Undercover, Frank Mackey, convinces her to go undercover as the dead girl to try to find out what happened to her. She joins a close-knit group of postgrads who are all studying literature. There’s four of them, in addition to Lexi – the dead girl and mystery woman who enrolled in Trinity under a previous undercover alias of Cassie’s – living in an old manor house. They all own the house together and Daniel, the ringleader/dad of the group, hopes that they can live together happily forever. Cassie finds out that Lexi was looking to share her portion of the house and get out of there – on the run and living a thousand lives, as was her MO. Cassie likes the group and the lifestyle so much that she starts keeping things from Frank and seems to be forgetting about Sam, her boyfriend in Murder. But she’s eventually pulled out of it by the fact that she’s doing her job. 

French is an incredible writer. The more I read her stuff the more I like it. My only complaints with this book was how unlikely the situation was – even though French does put a lot of work in addressing it and justifying it. I like that the premise is ludicrous, but it’s also ludicrous, you know? My second complaint was that Cassie keeps a couple things secret from Frank “on instinct” which translates to me as “in service of the plot.” It’s the Buffy conundrum, where most of the conflict would be resolved if at any point Buffy just told her friends what was going on. 

I love how strong the characters were in this book. Strong as full and striking. Cassie’s also just plain strong, in the sense that she’s good at her job – but not like a super hero or genius or anything like that. What I mean is that she’s brave and observant. She’s a good detective. French is also brilliant at setting and will also take a bit of text time to philosophize on modern Ireland. It’s all interesting and completely absorbing. 

Rating: ★★★★★