She’s brilliant, anxious, angry, angsty, and a total weirdo. Cassie isn’t some hard-drinking caricature, or a generic “regular” person. It’s like the high gothic dreaminess of The Secret History got transplanted into an episode of The Fall.īut what got me was Cassie Maddox herself. There are decaying mansions, secret meetings, shocking twists, and also spooky antique furniture.

Cassie takes over the dead woman’s life, living in her house with her intensely close-knit roommates, all of whom seem to know something. So what changed me? It wasn’t just the plot, though it's great: Police officer Cassie Maddox goes undercover to help solve a seemingly impossible crime - the murder of a woman who looks exactly like her. I started reading on Friday night, and put the book down on Sunday evening understanding all the places a book about a crime could take you. It was about a female cop’s confused inner life, the haunted house inside her head.

It opens not in a police station or murderer’s lair, but in a dream: “Some nights, if I’m sleeping on my own, I still dream about Whitethorn House.” It echoes the opening of one of the great gothic novels, Daphne du Marier’s Rebecca : “Last night, I dreamt I went to Manderlay again.” It’s an opening that isn’t about tormented dudes, gnarly crimes, or beautiful dead women. I thought I was in for more gentle, murder-y distraction.īut from the first line, I knew I was wrong. I bought French’s second novel, The Likeness, a sequel to In the Woods, without even flipping through it. In The Woods was excellently written, but not all that different than what I had anticipated: emotionally tortured male cop, dead girl, shocking secret in a small town, yada yada.Ī year later, while in another protracted break-up - yes, I now understand that the problem was me - I wanted a book to take my mind off it all. I guess I hoped a book about corpses could distract me from the corpse of my relationship. But I grabbed French’s novel in the Vienna airport anyway. In fact, I believed the genre was totally riddled with cliches about sad cops and hot dead women.

I read Tana French’s first novel, In The Woods, while on vacation with a boy who was very clearly about to dump me. In this installment, Gabrielle Moss writes about Tana French's The Likeness, the second novel in the author's acclaimed Dublin Murder Squad series.

Bustle's I'm So Jealous series is dedicated to the books, TV shows, movies, podcasts, and more that super fans are so jealous someone else gets to experience for the first time.

The likeness tana french review