And its fate is perhaps more tragic than those of any of the others. It breathes and moves and speaks just as much as any other character. The house in which Lexie and her friends live. The other vast character in the novel – perhaps the biggest and most significant character – is Whitethorn House itself. Living with each other in Daniel’s inherited manorial house, distant from both the local village and other students at Trinity College, they are impossibly and intimidatingly close. Just like the cliques of girls in The Secret Place, the depiction of Lexie’s friends – Abby, Rafe, Daniel and Justin – is thrilling and enticing and unreal and so tempting. Impossible to grasp or to capture, flowing through the fingers of each character who tries.Īnd when Cassie does pick up Lexie’s life, we are introduced to another of French’s trademarks: an impenetrably close group of friends with whom the dead girl had been living and who Cassie has to infiltrate. Here, Lexie Maddison is as ephemeral as the wind and as fluid as water: we only see her once before Cassie steps into her shoes and we unravel hints of an intriguing mercurial – and probably damaged – character. The dead are often a very visceral lyn solid ground point in a detective novel: they are static, they are probed and opened up and explored. It’s nice to see Mackey again: a slightly clichéd to-hell-with-the-rules detective who bulldozer his way into the investigation, just as he does in The Secret Place.

And as the dead girl was using an identity – Lexie Maddison – which Cassie had invented to go undercover with, her old boss Frank Mackey was called in and, through him, Cassie was brought in to go undercover as the dead girl.

She’s not wedded to the purely credible and mundane, which sets her apart from many crime writers. It stretches our willingness to suspend disbelief a little – but then French’s books always have that touch of the otherworldly about them anyway. In this novel, she is brought back to being undercover when the corpse of a girl who looks exactly like her is discovered. But French switched narrators from the unreliable and, for me, uncredited Rob Ryan to his erstwhile partner, Cassie Maddox.Īnd a small detail dropped into In The Woods becomes a critical plot point here: Maddock had worked in Undercover before she had transferred to Murder. I love the way that it follows seamlessly on the heels of In The Woods and Operation Vestal – the investigation into Katy Devlin’s death in thst debut novel – was a ghostly presence throughout. Her writing style is simultaneously lyrical and languid, full of synaethesia and, at the same time, credible and realistic.Īnd this, her second novel in the Dublin Murder Squad series, is a delight!

The likeness novel