She alone knows that he was the surviving child of three who went missing in the wood in 1984. Adam has hidden his secret from everyone in the police force except his partner and best friend Cassie. This mystery, heavy on psycho-drama, is set in the Dublin suburb of Knocknaree and is the first in a sequence to feature detectives Cassie Maddox and Adam Ryan. Sent into the viper’s den, Cassie must feel her way around the complicated dynamics of house without revealing her true identity, all the while knowing that there’s every chance she’s living with a murderer.The discovery of a body near a spooky wood forces a murder-squad detective in Ireland to confront his own horrific past, in an engrossing if melancholy debut. The premise of The Likeness is a little implausible, I’ll admit, but once you get over the concept that one person can be swapped out for another if they look enough alike, it’s a taut and tense thriller.

With no other leads to go on, Mackie sends Cassie back into the murdered girl’s sharehouse as ‘Lexie’, with the hope that whoever killed her has another crack at it.

The dead woman, Lexie Madison, isn’t just a dead ringer for Cassie but she goes by the same name the detective used in a former undercover case. Traumatised by the fall out following the events of In the Woods, detective Cassie Maddox has abandoned her position in the Murder Squad, but her former mentor, undercover detective Frank Mackey, drags her back in when a young woman is discovered murdered in an abandoned house. Like all of the books in this series, In the Woods explores the theme of memory, and how the past continues to affect the present. The reader has the feeling of being invited into an existing world with established and familiar relationships already in play. 22 years later he’s put his past behind him but when he and his partner, Cassie Maddox, are sent to investigate another murder of a child in the same stretch of woods, Rob’s history – kept secret from everyone but Maddox – threatens to overwhelm him.įrench’s skill for well-developed characters is illustrated beautifully in her first book. Even in adulthood, Rob (now a detective for the Dublin Police) has never recovered the memories from the period that he was missing. He was with two friends at the time of his disappearance and of them, nothing is ever heard of again.

At the age of 12, Rob Ryan was discovered on the edge of the woods near his home with slash marks on his back, and his shoes full of someone else’s blood.

In the woods book tana french