Book Lists, Reviews, and Recommendations Vol. 1 #2
My Giving Tuesday Becomes Giving Thursday
I returned a couple of days ago from a cruise in the Mediterranean. It was the trip of a lifetime and I’ll be writing more about that and the books I read while there. But in the meantime do me a favor and book it on over to my fundraising page for Folio on GiveLively. You can read why I’m supporting Folio: The Seattle Athenaeum and learn more about all the great bookish things we are working on over there. Every $25 (or $5k if you are feeling generous) helps.
Review: The Likeness by Tana French
French, Tana. The Likeness. Penguin Books, 2008.
The Likeness was the second thriller in Tana French's Dublin Murder squad series which was published in 2008. It was also made into a television series Dublin Murders and was chosen for a number of lists including Best Novel of the Year by Salon, Publisher's Weekly, and was a Crime Fiction Favorite of Los Angeles Times.
The plot is a bit implausible, but suspend your disbelief and it can be quite a ride. Detective Cassie Maddox is pulled back into the murder squad after a girl is found murdered who not only looks like Cassie but has also been living under the assumed name of Lexie Madison--an undercover identity created by Cassie. The lead detective comes up with a cockamamie plan to cuckoo Cassie into Lexie's flatmates’ house so they can work to find the murderer. Like no one will notice that Lexie is a bit different. Seems like a good plan for a future class action lawsuit against the department, but stay with it...
Part of the fun is watching Cassie (who has her own trust issues) work through her own loneliness, isolation, her past identity as someone else, and that of the murdered woman.
"Her version of Lexie Madison had been comfortingly, a little different from mine. Way back in UCD, I played Lexie as a cheerful, easygoing, sociable, happiest at the center of the action; nothing unpredictable about her, no dark edges, nothing that could make dealers or buyers see her as a risk.… The mystery girl's Lexie had been more mercurial, more volatile, more willful and capricious."
The New York Times recently wrote about Dark Academia as a lifestyle, and Lexie's flatmates (and murder suspects) are a group of University students living together in a comfy old refurbished mansion living what I envision Dark Academia-core to be like, much of which involves knowing things about English literature.
"Even their free time involved stuff like Rafe playing piano and Daniel reading Dante out loud and Abby restoring an eighteenth-century embroidered footstool. They didn't own a TV, never mind a computer--Daniel and Justin shared a manual typewriter, the other three were in enough contact with the twentieth century to use computers in college. They were like spies from another planet who had got their research wrong and wound up reading Edith Wharton and watching reruns of Little House on the Prairie. Frank had to look up piquet on the internet teach me how to play."
I felt a real Patricia Highsmith vibe in this work. As Cassie embeds herself in this life, she finds herself both working to solve the murder while growing to like her new life. These internal battles inside of Cassie make this a satisfying and thoughtful read and a bit more sophisticated than your average thriller. I found myself willing to suspend my disbelief to explore Cassie's psychology with author Tana French as she pulled into their web, "...laughing so hard that my stomach hurt and I had to stick my fingers in my ears till I could get my breath back; Rafe's arm flung out under Abby's neck, my feet propped on Justin's ankles, Abby reaching up a hand to take Daniel's. It was as if none of the jagged edges had ever existed; it was close and warm and shining as that first week again, only better a hundred times better because I wasn't on the alert and fighting to get my bearings and stay in place."
Oh, boy, Cassie, get back on the case.
This is the second in the series, In The Woods was the first and there are now at least six, and another and most recent, Witch Elm, which also takes place in Dublin. If you like Northern European and Scandanavian thrillers, I've dabbled a bit, it isn't my first go but I liked this. Also, check out the Starz Dublin Murders series which combines the first two books In the Woods and the Likeness into one season. I thought that was an exceptional series and the reason I picked this book up in the first place.
Books and Author Mentions
For fun here are some authors and other works mentioned by Tana French in The Likeness:
Charlotte Brontë
Dante
Edith Wharton
Barbara Kingsolver
Brothers Grimm
She Dressed to Kill by Rip Corelli
Watership Down by Richard Adams
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Henry V, and Hamlet by William Shakespeare
Ian Fleming
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
Genesis
Jacobean plays