The books I read that would fall under the mystery/suspense genre are few and far between, and I tend to enjoy more character-driven stories rather than action-oriented mysteries. But in a departure from the norm, my library book club chose Tana French’s novel, The Likeness, which was our most recent book. It was not without some trepidation that I began reading, but it wasn’t long before I was under the book’s spell.

There were two things I had to dispel right away, though. Firstly, I had to suspend disbelief that a woman would not just look similiar, but identical to another woman. And not just any two women, but one is an Irish cop and the other has just been found murdered just miles away. The other was the sense that I’d read this book before, a literary déjà vu if you will, since the situation and characters bears more than a passing resemblance to Donna Tartt’s suspenseful and sinister novel, The Secret History. In fact, in post-reading research, I learned that Tartt’s novel is one of French’s favorites and one of her influences.

But don’t let those two issues deter you from reading The Likeness. It’s a cracking good read in its own right and implausability issues aside, it has a suspenseful plot that held my interest for all of its 480 pages.

Cassie Maddox is a young Irish detective, working in the domestic violence departments after stints in undercover and homicide, respectively. Her boyfriend, Sam, a homicide detective, calls her out to an Irish village on the outskirts of Dublin to a dilapidated cottage where a young woman has been found murdered. The dead girl has been identified as Lexie Madison, a pseudonym that Cassie used when she was undercover. Sam, who thought at first that it was Cassie who was dead, is rattled even further when Frank, an undercover detective and Cassie’s former boss, suggests that pulling the old switcheroo on Cassie and the dead girl would be the perfect way to solve the murder. After undergoing preparations to assume the dead girl’s identity, Cassie/Lexie returns to the village manor house she shares with four other post-graduate students, to discover who killed her doppelgänger. Suspects and motives are both unclear, and the line between professional and personal is also blurred, as Cassie delves into Lexie’s insular and enigmatic life.

The Likeness is French’s second novel, after the award-winning In the Woods, which also features Cassie Maddox. Although not strictly a sequel, French does allude to the events of the prior book, but in a way that does not divulge too much but instead incites a desire to read the first book and find out exactly what made Cassie into the person she is when we meet her in The Likeness.

The Likeness also serves as my third entry into this year’s RIP Challenge, which means I have just a few days to read and blog about another suitable book, which you never know, just may happen. Stay tuned!