“The Likeness”, sequel to “In the Woods”

Tara French’s sequel to In the Woods is The Likeness. This book is told from the perspective of Rob’s old partner, Cassie. I think I prefer her since she’s a bit more straightforward, but the fact that there’s a clear difference between the two narrations says a lot about the writer.

The premise of this case is that a dead girl is found who looks exactly like Cassie, and is using the same name that Cassie used years ago when she was undercover. Cassie then goes undercover again as this girl (they pretend that she was only in a coma so her friends don’t suspect anything) to examine her life from the inside and try to find her killer.

As a result there’s a lot of writing about how she created this persona and now she has a life of her own, like the undercover name is a character herself with her own agenda here. Which is interesting and a little irritating since it obscures the fact that this is literally just a name.

What makes this a unique mystery is the fact that In the Woods and most mysteries are focused on the killer and trying to figure out who it is. This story centers around the victim and trying to unravel her past. It’s an interesting angle that not many other authors take. The switch from Murder Squad to Undercover is also interesting as it presents an entirely new set of challenges for the characters. Cassie has to worry about acting the part all the time, not just about finding the murderer hidden in the area.

A couple other characters carry over as well, Sam is also here as the lead detective on the case and as Cassie’s boyfriend. Rob makes a brief cameo and gets mentioned quite a bit, but never directly shows his face. I appreciated that, having the series move on from that first book makes each case separate and capable of standing on their own. It also shows more of the fallout from In the Woods since this is where Cassie has ended up six months after that case.

There’s a bunch of quirky new characters, Frank is Cassie’s undercover boss who pretty much stubbornly does his own thing this entire book. He’s one of those characters silently orchestrating everything in the background, and the reader knows it, but none of the others can do anything about it. There’s also the four students that the victim was living with, and now Cassie has to get along with. Like her previous novel, French gives all of them a distinct personality and individual thought process.

It’s an interesting sequel, not directly sequential, but has ties to several old characters as well as introducing new ones. Personally I like that idea.

“In the Woods”, no relation to the musical “Into the Woods”

In the Woods is a fascinating mystery novel by Tana French. It’s unique from most other books of its genre out there, this is an in-depth novel with a world of it’s own.

It opens with a message from the narrator, Rob, saying that he is a detective and instead of the common idea that he is obsessed with the truth, he does lie. These lies become a bit of a theme in the story as they try to sort out the fiction in this case. And it’s surprising how often this happens, and how often they fail to spot the contradictions. And since it opens with this statement, the book plays with the idea of an unreliable narrator. There’s nothing openly unreliable about Rob, and he does portray the story as it happened to him accurately, but he doesn’t know all of the facts all the time either, and that’s what makes him unreliable.

The plot itself is very intricate. It centers around a murder case, but there’s another one that Rob was involved in when he was a child that repeatedly comes up. The main question that nags at Rob is, are these two connected?

The world of this story is similarly complex, the characters are vibrant (rare for mystery books) making it more similar to an adventure novel than a classic mystery. Most detective stories that I’ve seen have the classic partners who are perfect for each other that go and catch a bad guy and like whatever. In this one, every character has a past and a personality that contributes to the story, or at least shows in their character. There aren’t any “stock” characters, each one is well-developed with their own voice.

On a similar note, Rob does have a partner, Cassie, but they aren’t a redux of the standard crime solving partners (Holmes and Watson being the model). They’re really partners and are on equal footing with each other, working as a unit to solve this case. It’s a pretty beautiful relationship.

Of course, everything falls apart at the end as a result of all these different strings tugging at the characters as a result of the plot. It’s a glorious fallout, pretty much nothing is left unscathed. I won’t reveal anything, but prepare yourselves.

This is the first in a series about the Dublin Murder Squad, I’m very excited with where French goes from here!

Haruki Murakami Can’t End Books To Save His Life

So far, I have read 1Q84 and more recently Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and his Years of Pilgrimage by Haruki Murakami. And one thing that has bothered me about both books is that they don’t end in a satisfying way. (This will be focusing on Colorless Tsukuru.) In both books, Murakami starts out with an interesting idea, in this case it’s a man whose high school friends mysteriously abandon him one day, but they don’t resolve satisfactorily. 1Q84 flat out didn’t solve anything, and it felt like he was leaving it open ended for kicks and giggles or the hype or something. Colorless Tsukuru is similar, it ends on a cliffhanger and leaves a few other aspects open.

The cliffhanger at the end isn’t a big problem for me, my issue is with the one friend that Tsukuru makes in college: Haida. Where he goes is never explained, and the bag from the story he tells Tsukuru is never elaborated on either. And this should be important since the one friend that Tsukuru made since high school leaving him has left scars as well. Not explaining this undermines the closure that Tsukuru kind of gets by the end.

I don’t have a problem with ambiguity in most novels, the murder mystery that pops up I thought was fine leaving (visiting the grave or something would have been nice, but that’s unrelated), and Sara’s choice at the end was also fine. But when it seems like the author forgets that the ambiguity is there (in Haida’s case) or when the main character’s quest is to solve this ambiguity (and it’s literally the purpose of the novel) we should end with something more substantial.

Also this might be nitpicky, but it’s a really short book for “years of pilgrimage.” Which is a little disappointing.

I found Tsukuru pretty easy to relate to, the only aspect that surprised me was that he managed to get a girlfriend, but other than that he’s believable. (Speaking as someone in college, this fear of losing my high school friends is pretty real.)

Then there’s the other classic Murakami issue: the women. The women here are either plain or gorgeous, with no in between. And of course, there’s always a shoutout to their breasts whenever they come into contact with anything.

He also seems to really enjoy keeping detailed notes on what everyone’s penis is doing throughout the story, which tends to drive me up the wall, I don’t know about everyone else.

Other than that, there are a few nice artistic touches, like the number 4 in the page numbers is always white in my version. And the cover art is also well done, the colors and a train map are arranged like a hand (Tsukuru is the map while his four high school friends are the colors, hence the “colorless”).

I suspect that there might be a connection between the color nicknames and train lines (this is mostly influenced by the cover art) but I know nothing about Japanese trains so I can’t really speak to that.

So that’s all I wanted to rant about Murakami, maybe his other books are better, but this seems like a trend more than anything else.