The Likeness, Every Dead Thing

The Likeness, by Tana French, is a good book with some great flaws.  I've felt for a long time that the true strength of the mystery genre is that it places characters in emotionally heightened situations, allowing the author to bring out psychological portraits that might otherwise be too diffuse to make a compelling story.  The Likeness is the kind of book that shows off the strengths and limitations of the genre to psychological studies.

It's pretty clear that French is most interested in drawing a picture of five disparate housemates uniting against a hostile world; she's not really that interested in writing a whodunit.  The mystery part of the novel serves two functions: it allows her to bring the lives of the housemates into focus, as they try to cope with the increased stress of an investigation, and it keeps the narrative focused, rather than letting it wander off into the minutiae of the housemates' lives.

The price she pays, though, is that the set-up is incredibly contrived.  Detective Cassie Maddox, from The Woods, was an undercover agent before that novel started.  She's been out of undercover work for some time, when a double of her shows up dead, with a driver's license in the name of one of her undercover personae.  To investigate the murder, she infiltrates the house, disguised as her double.  Although French pays lip service to the difficulties involved, it's never really convincing.  It's one thing to have a close double (I've met two completely unrelated people who could be brothers), but it's a whole other thing to move in with people who've seen the original every day.  More importantly, the whole set-up just seems like a very backward way to do an investigation.  It's hard to imagine the police going for the kind of manpower and undercover investigation takes instead of a brute force interrogation.

If you can accept the premise, though, the novel is very successful.  French's portraits of the students and their effect on Cassie felt very real; no two-dimensional characters here.  French is also exploring a theme which she mentions explicitly a couple of times, that you can have what you want, but you must pay for it somehow.  I know that some reviewers have questioned Cassie's engagement at the end of the novel, but it seemed to me that she'd finally learned this lesson -- you can't have everything, and, for the things you choose to have, you have to realize what the price will be and decide whether to take them.

I also enjoyed John Connolly's Every Dead Thing, but it's a much simpler novel.  It's two serial-killer procedurals in one novel, with a bit of the supernatural thrown in for spice.  He's obviously not reaching as much as French was, but on the other hand, he's accomplished what he wanted to do and ended up with an enjoyable novel that doesn't have the kind of glaring flaws that The Likeness had.