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Let’s try that again! For some reason the post didn’t load in its entirety – apologies to those who were confused by the post this morning.

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My first Chunkster read of the year! And by golly, did this book surprise me.

I stumbled across The Likeness, by Tana French by what now seems to have been pure Fate – I am a major fan of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History and had been looking for years for a book similar to it…
Finally, a book blog (I forget which one, d’oh!) yielded a possible answer to this years-long search: they had just read In the Woods, by Tana French – and apparently there were some striking similarities between her book and Donna Tartt’s fabulous tome. In the reply comments someone had written: “If you think In the Woods is like The Secret History, wait ’til you read her second book, The Likeness!”

Jackpot.

The Likeness is essentially a murder mystery – you have your undercover detective Cassie Maddox, still dealing with the events of In the Woods six months previous. As a result, she’s been transferred from Dublin’s murder squad to domestic violence, in an effort to ‘cope’. But then, she’s pulled back on to the murder scene with a twist – the murder victim in this particular case is the spitting image of Cassie herself.

This book was delicious. Surprisingly well-written. Fabulous at building suspense. Perhaps I had low expectations, but for much of its 693 pages I was marvelling over the tasty little passages that made me think: “why didn’t I get to this author sooner?”

Passages like this:

“‘Here’s the story,’ Sam said. ‘At about quarter past six this morning, a local fella called Richard Doyle was walking his dog along this lane. He let it off the lead to have a run about in the fields. There’s a ruined house not far off the lane, and the dog went in and wouldn’t come out; in the end, Doyle had to go after it. He found the dog sniffing around the body of a woman. Doyle grabbed the dog, legged it out of there and rang the uniforms.’” [Pg 21]

Interspersed with this:

“Drink suited Daniel. It put a vivid flush through his cheekbones and a spark deep in his eyes, loosened his stiffness into a sure, animal grace. Usually Rafe was the resident eye candy, but that night it was Daniel I couldn’t take my eyes off. Leaning back among the candle flames and the rich colours and the faded brocade of the chair, with the glass glowing red in his hand and dark hair falling across his forehead, he looked like some ancient war leader himself: a high king in his banquet hall, shining and reckless, celebrating between battles.” [Pg 479]

Mixed with a little of this:

“Then I sat down against the wall of the outer room and felt my heart beat where hers had finished beating. The air was soft and warm as cream; tiny moths whirled around me like petals. There were things growing beside me out of the earth where she had bled, a pale clump of bluebells, a tiny sapling that looked like hawthorn: things made of her.” [Pg 471]

A recipe for my perfect brand of crime fiction.

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Year of First Publication: 2008

Year of This Publication: 2009

Pages: 693

Book Challenges: The Chunkster Challenge 2011

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 8th, 2011 at 7:49 am and is filed under Book Reviews, Contemporary Fiction, Crime Fiction. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.