The Likeness (Dublin Murder Squad #2)
By Tana French
Publication Year: 2008
Type: Fiction
Genre: crime, mystery
Read on 2019-01-26
View additional specs on this book in Muhan’s 2019 Reading Survey ➞
★★★☆☆
Not as good as In The Woods. Cassie is the focus of this sequel but somehow she isn’t even really what the book is about. After reading ITW I was hoping for a lot more on Cassie’s life and relationships, especially with Sam, but instead she just goes undercover and loses her personality completely. Sam barely appears in the book, and that entire relationship is shoehorned into the very end. Apart from him, the only non-undercover contact Cassie interacts with or thinks about at all is Frank. The choices she makes throughout are also mostly just things her undercover alias would do, so in the
end you don’t really even learn a whole lot about her.
The premise of this book was absurd from the get-go so I was ready for a wild ride, but the resolution/reveals were pretty unsatisfying. That said, the characters were mostly great, the setting of the old mansion was gorgeous and almost its own character, and Cassie’s descent into her undercover alias was well written. My biggest gripe is Daniel, whose characterization seems to change completely in the final act. Rafe and Abby also had uncharacteristic/out of the blue moments towards the end. Maybe I wasn’t paying enough attention but that kind of annoyed me.
I listened to the audiobook, which was phenomenally narrated in a gorgeous Irish accent (ft. many other character accents) by Heather O’Neill. In retrospect, I probably would’ve gotten more out of the book if I read it, as the audiobook is a whopping 22.5 hrs long and it really started to drag.
