Intriguing set-up, right? Just the concept of undercover work, pretending to be someone else - which is detailed here, both in the present and in flashbacks to Cassie's earlier experience - is fascinating, but when combined with this particular situation with a look-alike and a stolen fake identity, it is truly mind-blowing and completely compelling right from page one.

Cassie is able to convince them she is Lexie and lives a strangely comfortable and pleasant life them for weeks, as the investigation continues. These five grad students are an odd bunch, sharing a huge old house that one of them inherited from an uncle in this small village, carpooling into school each day and living a very insulated - and oddly old-fashioned - existence together. They had carefully lied to Lexie's four housemates and said Lexie was in a coma, in order to keep this option open, so they tell them she woke up and is recovering, quickly prep Cassie using videos Lexie made, plus hasty investigations, and send Cassie as Lexie 'home,' even though it's possible that one of the four people she lives with could be the one who killed her. How is it possible that this look-alike is using Cassie's made-up identity? And, more importantly, who killed her and why? After a few days of quiet investigation, Frank convinces Sam that the only way to solve the case is from the inside, with Cassie going undercover again, as a different version of Lexie. Even more puzzling, her ID card identifies her as Lexie Madison, an undercover alias that Cassie and her boss, Frank Mackey, invented for Cassie years ago. When Cassie arrives at the scene, she is in for a shock (as Sam was earlier) because the murdered victim, lying in an abandoned cottage in a remote village, is a young woman who looks exactly like Cassie.

I was completely immersed in this compelling and unique murder mystery.Ĭassie Maddox, a detective who was featured in French's first novel, In the Woods, has transferred to a quieter job in Domestic Violence ('quieter' is relative) when she gets a call in the middle of the night from her boyfriend, Sam, who is a Murder Squad detective.

Way back in 2013, and I don't know why I waited so long to read book 2 because she is such a good writer. This is the second book in her popular Dublin Murder Squad series. My transition book from Big Book Summer to my dark & creepy fall reading for RIP Challenge was The Likeness by Tana French.

The likeness novel