The Likeness

Cassie's old undercover boss, Frank Mackey, proposes a bold plan: let the world believe Lexie survived, and send Cassie in to take her place. Lexie had been a postgraduate student who lived with four friends in Whitethorn House, a crumbling old mansion, where they shared everything and kept the outside world at a distance. Cassie moves in, studies their routines and starts to look for the killer among people who seem to have loved Lexie.

The longer she stays, the more Cassie is drawn into the group's warm, closed world and the more she wonders who Lexie really was. Tana French writes rich, beautiful prose and builds a mood that is dreamy and uneasy at once. The pace is slow and the plot requires some suspension of disbelief, but the psychology is gripping. There is some strong language and a violent death at the heart of the story, though it is not graphic.

Haunting, elegant and absorbing, a book that many readers rank as French's best and that can be read on its own, though it follows In the Woods. Readers who loved The Secret History will feel at home here. About 624 pages in the Penguin mass-market paperback.