The Likeness by Tana French
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Tana French is one of the best crime writers working today. Her prose is stunningly good, complex yet eminently readable. However, no one can write well enough to make a weak plot plausible.
French’s scintillating prose was the only thing that led me to finish this very poorly plotted story. I knew the plot wasn’t going to work in the first 100 pages, and sadly, the next 500 bore out that conclusion. I expect the great length of the book was because the author used every artifice at her command to make the story work, but it just didn’t happen.
Cassie Maddox is a former Dublin Murder Squad member and former undercover policewoman. When a woman who looks just like her is found murdered, Cassie goes undercover to find her killer. Not only was the vic Cassie’s double, she had also taken the same name that Cassie used as an undercover. Huh? Is your credulity strained yet? Just wait.
Cassie goes to live with the victim’s roommates, a collection of oddball college students who live as a family in an old mansion in the outskirts of a rural village outside Dublin. She manages to convince four people who knew her doppelganger intimately that she is their roomie, successfully posing as a PhD student in English literature at Trinity College, even though she has only a BA. Her housemates are all English grad students too, yet do not see through her.
Cassie wears a microphone the whole time and carries a revolver under her clothes, which nobody spots. She goes for an hour walk late each evening so she can sit in a tree and have long phone convos with her police colleagues. Her housemates suspect nothing.
In the copy I read, it took 500 pages for the situation to come to a head. I frankly don’t see how any competent developmental editor would have allowed this. The ending was expected, lackluster and unbelievable.
Tana French’s prose is always a joy, and is the only reason I gave this book as many as three stars. It’s a shame such great writing had to be wasted on such a poor story.
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