In the Woods messed me up so badly it took me two years to give Tana French’s Dublin Murder Squad series another go. I like French’s writing—it’s genre fiction that pauses for breath instead of just hurtling through plot.
If Woods was an exercise in withholding catharsis, The Likeness feels more straightforward—at times French seems to be explicitly reminding the reader that the central mystery is just a device to unearth the true conflict happening within Detective Cassie Maddox. I had braced myself for something similarly bleak as Woods; when the ending came I let out a long breath of relief.