After a murder investigation that completely destroyed her relationship with her detective partner and best friend, Dublin murder detective Cassie Maddox moved to the Domestic Violence unit and took up target shooting to deal with her feelings of anxiety. She’s therefore surprised when her boyfriend, Sam O’Neill calls her from a murder site, and asks her to come meet him, but to make sure she wears sunglasses and a hat or some such, to disguise her appearance a bit.
Once Cassie sees the victim, she understands not only why Sam sounded so shaken on the phone, but why he wanted her to come down in person. The murder victim looks exactly like Cassie, and her ID claims that she is “Alexandra Madison”. This is impossible, as Alexandra “Lexi” Madison was a fake identity Cassie and her boss created from scratch for an undercover drug case Cassie was part of several years ago. The dead young woman could be Cassie’s identical twin, only Cassie is an only child, with no knowledge of any family connection that could explain the similarities.
Her former boss from Undercover, Frank Mackay is also on the scene, bursting with excitement because of the crazy idea he’s concocted. He wants to use Cassie’s uncanny resemblance to the murder victim to go undercover, pretending to be “Lexi” and try to ferret out who the killer is by interacting with all the people in the victim’s life. He wants to tell everyone that Lexi Madison survived her stabbing and has been comatose, giving Cassie time to study the victim carefully. Then he wants her to move in with Lexi’s house mates, go to her classes and basically pretend to be her for a few weeks to see what comes up. Hopefully the killer will be so rattled, they reveal themselves in some way.
Sam is absolutely appalled. Cassie initially refuses, but Frank is relentless and uses every bit of his former hold on Cassie to cajole, lure and entice her. He’s extremely observant and knows Cassie well, seeing how miserable she is in the DV unit and suspects there may be aspects to her last murder case she hadn’t yet processed. Here she has another shot at helping to solve a murder, from a completely different angle. After the murder investigation (not being presented as such to the suspects) still has no leads after several days, Cassie agrees to go undercover.
Having studied every piece of information they have on the victim, including very convenient cell phone videos, Cassie is able to learn the woman’s inflections, mannerisms and habits and can also study how “Lexi” interacted with her house mates. The police have let the house mates (still among the primary suspects, despite water tight alibis) know that Lexi has short term amnesia, to help Cassie cover up any initial glitches when she is living among them.
Wired for sound and armed, Cassie is sent to the big house in the Irish countryside where the woman calling herself Lexi lived with four friends – Daniel, Abby, Rafe and Justin. She needs to convince these four highly intelligent young academics, who knew Lexi better than anyone, that Lexi isn’t dead, she’s just been in a coma after a savage knife attack. Neither O’Neill nor Mackay trust the house mates, for all that their stories all match up. They believe one or several of the friends may have been Lexi’s murderer.
Full review here.
I for real need to have a conversation with somebody about the way that French slips in these weird instances of the paranormal/magical realism or whatever it is, I don’t even know. I took the likeness in this book as a metaphor and didn’t expect it to adhere to the limits of realism. There are also examples in each of the other books that walk the line between is this paranormal, is this insanity, is this a hallucination? And all of the instances in those books tie in to the central theme of the books. Here it’s Cassie looking like Lexie, so she can slip into her life and the book can examine friendship and identity. In the last one, it’s the animal in the woods that might be a real animal, and might be a metaphorical representation of Rob’s fears, and might also be a real monster that kidnapped the children. IT IS CRAZY MAKING.
I see the magical realism aspect a lot more in the previous book than in this one. Here I just thought she took a high concept conciept and ran with it. Very entertainingly too, if I might add. I just could never entirely distance myself from the little voice in the back of my head that kept saying: This is f*d up, and a horrible thing to do to these people, even if one of them might be a murderer.
I like how messed up French’s protagonists are and am glad that I didn’t end the book totally hating Cassie, like I did Rob. I know you said in your own review of In the Woods that you identify with him and his actions a lot, but having never met you in real life, I choose to believe that you are doing yourself a disservice and that you just think you’re like that. Because Rob is the WORST. You’re clearly not (based on our shared taste in books). See, I proved with science that your perception of yourself is incorrect. You’re welcome.
It’s most prominent in the first one and books four and five. I’ll have to wait and see what you think of them. If it weren’t for the other books, I probably would have felt the same way you did about this one, that it was just a conceit, but mixed in with the others it makes me go hmmmm.
I don’t think he’s the worst. What he did was awful, and I’d like to think I wouldn’t have done what he did, but I completely understand (to the point of empathy) why he did it. I just feel really awful for him, because even as much as he hurt Cassie, he’s hurting himself more. He is tragic to me. He makes me sad.
Also, you’re being nice. I’m a MONSTER.