Operation Mirror

Last year I read Tana French’s debut novel, In the Woods, upon the recommendation of a friend.  I liked it quite a lot, and found it to be a good, tautly written, psychologically complex murder mystery.  It combined the exacting detail of the police procedural with some dark hints of the uncanny, all presented with sharp, fluent prose.  When I saw French’s sort-of-a-sequel, The Likeness, in my birthday bookstore crawl, I grabbed it.  The verdict is in, and it is very, very clear: although In the Woods was a great novel, The Likeness is exponentially better, perhaps one of the best mystery novels I’ve read.

I said above that it’s a sort of sequel.  In the first novel, the action revovles around Rob Ryan and, to a slightly lesser extent, his partner Cassie Maddox.  We learn a little about both detectives’ backgrounds, with the tantalizing hint that Cassie had worked in Undercover, where she was stabbed by a suspect.  This sets the stage for the new novel, with Cassie taking over the duties of the narrator and playing a multi-layered role as undercover cop, murder investigator, and bait.  In her days as an undercover agent, Cassie posed as a Dublin college student named Lexie Madison; in her dealings with drug dealers and users, she had been stabbed by a pathetic suspect, and, on the strength of her undercover work, she got herself transfered to the Murder Squad, where we find her in the first book.  In the sequel, she has transfered to Domestic Violence, almost entirely because of the trauma caused by the investigation featured in the first novel.

She is quickly dragged back into the world of murder and undercover by an early morning phone call from her boyfriend, a detective in the murder squad.  He is frantic, and asks her to come down to a murder scene as soon as she can.  When she arrives at the old cottage she is startled to find her old boss from her undercover days, Frank Mackey, there as well.  His appearance is explained when she sees the murder victim: a young woman named Lexie Madison.  Not only does the young woman bear Cassie’s old undercover name, she also looks almost exactly like Cassie.  Mackey, who loves to play rough with the rules, sees this as the prefect opportunity to resurrect Lexie the undercover agent, using Cassie to flush out the murderer.  Although Cassie is at first horrified at the idea, she soon finds herself oddly drawn to it, and agrees to the outrageous plan.

Lexie–the murdered girl–had been a graduate student at Trinity, and she lived in an old Georgian mansion in the village of Glenskehy with four other graduate students in a strange, idyllic intellectual commune.  Daniel, one of the graduate students, had inherited the mansion from his eccentric old uncle, and he immediately shared his new home with his friends, making them co-owners.  There the five stayed, cooking together, reading together, living a completely isolated but apparently satisfying life.  The scenes of this life are some of the most remarkable in the novel.  In many ways, it sounds like the graduate school dream that many of us had: the students are free from worry about their living arrangements, and they move from their classes to their tutorials to their quiet, studious home life as if enchanted.  Their evenings are filled with books, intellectual discussions, card games, gentle teasing.

Outside the house, though, the world lurks.  Whitethorn (the name of the house) had been the home seat of the March family in the days of the Anglo-Irish landlords, and the locals in the village (which is presented as an almost primitively isolated and insular community) still detest the house and all it stands for.  This leads to a number of suspects.  Was Lexie murdered by an angry villager who had had enough of the Big House persecution?  Was she killed by a real estate developer who wanted to turn the house into a luxury golf resort?  Was she killed by one of her housemates?

The plot is never obvious, and although I suspected the killer early on, I never had quite enough reason to believe my suspicions, and I was easily led to suspect others along the way.  The entire time Cassie is playing Lexie and living in the house, French slowly but mercilessly turns up the tension until the final dramatic confrontation and resolution left me worn and twisted in agitation.  I read the last two hundred pages at a feverish pace, turnign pages as quickly as my eye could scan the words, needing to find out what was going to happen.

The novel, though, is not just a good page-turning yarn.  The prose is crystalline, and Cassie’s voice as she gradually falls in love with the house and its inhabitants is immensely seductive.  She comes across as clear-headed and analytical but also deeply passionate and alive.  French also deals with the history of Ireland and its harsh conflicts with honesty and heart.  The cottage where Lexie’s body is found is one of the many “famine cottages” found across the countryside, a cottage abandoned in the 1840s when its inhabitants either starved to death or immigrated.  The relationship between the big house and the village is eerily recreated in the relationship between Daniel and his friends.  Always lurking in the background is the Celtic Tiger, the loud, vibrant, electrified European hotspot that Ireland had become early in the millenium, an identity that threatens to overwhelm and destroy an older culture.  The older culture, however, is not sentimentalized, but is shown with all its flaws and violence.

I can’t wait to read what Tana French has planned.  This is a great book–read it.