The discovery of her murdered doppelganger leads a Dublin detective to insert herself into the victim's life. Cassandra Maddox, the Irish cop introduced in French's In the Woods (2007), gets an urgent call from her homicide-detective boyfriend Sam O'Neill. She is to drop everything, disguise herself and hustle to a murder scene that has clearly left Sam shaken. His distress is understandable. The corpse in the abandoned cottage outside the depressed suburban village of Glenskehy is a dead ringer for Cassie. Stranger still, the name on the victim's ID is Lexie Madison, the same name Cassie used during a long, dangerous, undercover operation. Before she was stabbed, Lexie was one of five residents, all Trinity University students, living in Whitethorn House, a mansion inherited by one of the students. Frank Mackey, Cassie's tough supervisor from her days in undercover, thinks the best bet for solving the Lexie murder case is to withhold news of the death from the public. This way, Cassie can pose as Lexie and perhaps get to the bottom of what happened. There are enough clues to Lexie's life in her phone camera that Cassie, against Sam's better judgment, takes the challenge. Several days later, armed and wired for sound, Cassie is dropped off at Whitethorn, where she is taken back into what proves to be a very tightly knit group. There is dark, brilliant Daniel, who owns the house, gay Justin, clever Abby and beautiful Rafe. Using the formidable acting skills that made her so successful in undercover work, Cassie seems able to convince the friends that she is Lexie. As she begins to reconstruct the events leading up to the murder, she finds herself sucked into the group, and her loyaltiesbegin to shift. Police procedures, psychological thrills and gothic romance beautifully woven into one stunning story.
“The big reveal isn’t ‘who done it’, the big reveal is why and what effects does it have?” Set in an insular small town in the Irish countryside, Tana French’s The Hunter follows a set of vibrant characters as they uncover secrets, plots and mystery among their friends and neighbors. French joins us to talk […]
It’s been over 10 years since Tana French’s atmospheric debut In the Woods, the start of the Dublin Murder Squad series, cemented her as “one of the greatest crime novelists writing today”(Vox). Her newest novel, The Searcher, is a standalone that does not disappoint. Once again, French uses the atmosphere, climate and circumstances of Ireland to flawlessly weave […]
Is there anything more satisfying than a stellar detective story? A good gumshoe is observant, hyper curious, and passionate about making the world a safer, more just place. The most interesting detectives also usually happen to be deeply flawed human beings. These tortured souls are often burdened with pasts so dark that only solving cases and […]
I expected to enjoy Gone Girl, but I wasn’t expecting to admire it. Gone Girl‘s premise, frankly, didn’t do much for me. Crazy wife! Cheating husband! Unforeseeable twist! I categorized it as an airport read, fun and forgettable. Boy was I wrong. Gone Girl is deserving of all the praise and trillions of copies sold and movie adaptations […]
In the 20 years since the publication of Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, following the obsessive, incestuous friendship of a small group of classics students at an elite New England college, the book has attracted a cultlike following of its own. Like its narrator, Richard, who longs to be a part of the secretive group, […]