Both books also delve into the complex psychology and procedure of police work.
The cold fact is that every murder I've worked was about the killer. The victim... was just the person who happened to wander into the sights when the gun was loaded and cocked. The control freak was always going to kill his wife the first time she refused to follow orders; your daughter happened to be the one who married him. The mugger was hanging around the alleyway with a knife, and your husband happened to be the next person who walked by... if we can figure out the exact point where someone walked into those crosshairs, we can go to work with our dark, stained geometries and draw a line straight back to the barrel of the gun.
Most readers, myself included, won't know enough about police work to tell whether all of Cassie's observations ring true, but French makes them feel real as rain. And she's good with noirish metaphors. "The words sent a slim knife of something like homesickness straight through me." "Lexie blew down the grass like a silver shower of wind, she rocked in the hawthorn trees and balanced light as a leaf on the wall beside me, she slipped along my shoulder and blazed down my back like fox fire." The dead Lexie, who wasn't even Lexie, comes to creepy life as brightly as any of the living characters in Cassie's intrigued and eventually obsessed mind.
But in spite of its unlikely plot, this is a more satisfying book than In the Woods (which you needn't read before this one, though it is enjoyable and would provide a bit of context). The Likeness has more richly drawn characters, a more satisfying conclusion, and most important, a more sympathetic and believably complex narrator. Maybe with Cassie Maddox the author has found her muse; maybe she'll move on to another lead investigator next time. Either way, she's raised her bar.
Article comments
1 - Natalie
This is the best book I have ever read