In the meantime, Cassie will learn how to be the version of Lexie that they knew. The detectives running the investigation will tell the four housemates that Lexie survived, barely, and may yet make a recovery. Cassie is persuaded to go back under cover, resume Lexie’s identity, and find out how she died. There she became involved with a group of four other graduate students sharing an old, big house in County Wicklow. It turns out that the dead woman had been mistaken for Lexie by a student acquaintance and, discovering that the identity had seemingly been abandoned, she assumed it and enrolled as a graduate student in Trinity. By the time that Lexie died, Cassie had transferred out of Murder again to Domestic Violence, following the botched investigation in In the Woods. Cassie survived, though, and transferred from undercover to the Murder squad.

That investigation ended with Cassie being stabbed, also in the chest. The victim looks just like Cassie and the name she’s been using is one that Cassie made up a few years earlier, when she was going undercover to investigate drug dealing in and around UCD. She has died from a stab wound in the chest. The Likeness starts with the discovery of the body of a woman who has been going by the name Lexie Madison. I’m probably not going to be able to do them all justice but I hope I can at least point you in the right direction. There are intriguing patterns of repetition and resemblance both within he novel itself and between it and its prececessor. The Likeness is a big, long (nearly 700 pages), complex novel, with several equally important themes. Tana French, The Likeness A novel of doubles, reflections, parallels - and deceptive resemblanceĬassie Maddox is a major character in Tana French’s first novel, In the Woods, but she’s right at the centre of the second, which she narrates.

Tana French, The Likeness Talk about booksĪ fortnightly newsletter by Art Kavanagh about things I’ve read

Tana french the likeness plot