BOOKS: The Likeness, Tana French (2008)

Follow-up to In the Woods, which I liked very much.

Cassie Maddox, a supporting player in that book, takes center stage this time. The events of In the Woods have led her to leave the Murder Squad of the Dublin police; she now works on the Domestic Violence unit. Her boyfriend, Sam, still works Murder, though, and he calls her early one morning, asking her to come to a murder scene.

When she arrives, she is shocked to see that the dead woman is her double. The woman's ID identifies her as Alexandra Madison. That's another surprise, because Lexie Madison doesn't really exist; she's one of the fake IDs that Cassie created for herself during her years working as an undercover officer.

Lexie is the type of murder victim who might not normally get special attention from the police, but given her ID and her resemblance to Cassie, the police can't entirely dismiss the possibility that Cassie was the intended victim, so solving the murder takes on added importance. Cassie's old boss, Frank, still heads up the undercover unit, and he makes the suggestion -- initially dismissed by Cassie and Sam as ludicrous -- that Lexie's friends should be told that she survived the assault, and that Cassie should go undercover as Lexie in order to gather information. Frank talks them into it, and Cassie moves into the large house that Lexie had been sharing with four other college students.

All of the skills that French displayed in In the Woods are on hand here -- intricate plotting, gorgeous prose, vivid characterization. I'm particularly impressed by the way characters change depending on whose point of view we see them from. For instance, the Cassie of The Likeness is recognizable as Cassie of In the Woods, but they aren't precisely the same; she's been changed by the events of the first book, and we're now seeing her as she sees herself instead of as Rob saw her.

The Likeness is, as police procedurals go, relatively low on action and violence; the climactic chapter, in which secrets are revealed and motives discovered, is a 30-page scene of four people in a room talking. But because French has so carefully and so skillfully defined those four characters for us, that long dialogue scene has more tension and energy than the action set pieces that conclude many lesser thrillers.

There's certainly plenty of room for French to continue writing novels set in the Dublin police department, and I like the idea of having a new protagonist for each story. Certainly Sam and Frank are interesting enough characters to carry books of their own.

A lot of authors have one good book in them, and I try not to get my hopes up too high after a first novel. But when you get a pair of books as fine as In the Woods and The Likeness, you've got real talent on your hands. It's going to be very exciting to see what Tana French does next and how her career develops; she promises to be one of the finest crime novelists of the new century.