Pam's Book 36: The Likeness

My favorite mystery reading buddy Trish gave this to me in between trips this summer, along with the latest Elizabeth George. I read it on the plane trip to Atlanta. I read it in Atlanta. I read it on the plane to New York. I read it the six hours we were stuck on the tarmac in New York. I finished it midway over the Atlantic. Maybe read isn't such a good term; devoured would be better. Tana French wrote another book before this one, something about the woods. I'd heard it was a good book but had an unsatisfying ending; this one, apparently, had a better ending.

Cassie Maddox, police detective, former undercover detective, has been left somewhat of a mess as the result of a former case (I'm assuming it's the case I missed in the first book). She no longer investigates murder, instead dedicating her time and energy to domestic violence. Until she receives a panicked call from her boyfriend, a homicide detective. A dead body has been found; a dead body who could be Cassie's twin. Not only does she look exactly like Cassie, but she carries an ID bearing Cassie's former undercover name, Lexie Madison. They make the radical decision to claim the girl hadn't died and instead send Cassie back home as Lexie to further investigate her death.

There is no point at which this book is not suspenseful, since we know Cassie is not really Lexie, but we don't know if anybody else knows that, and then there's the fact that somebody was trying to kill Lexie, so now somebody's probably after Cassie, thinking it's Lexie... Lexie lives an insular life with four other students, three boys and a girl. They're a bunch of oddballs, but they're a tight bunch of oddballs, and it's miraculous Cassie can insert herself in at all. We know from the very beginning that some sort of disaster ensues, but we're not sure what. The reader is constantly second guessing everyone's moves and motives, working to discover what goes wrong and how. Somehow the ending manages to be surprising even though you can kind of see it coming, once the downward spiral begins. I just might have to read the first book, unsatisfying ending notwithstanding.