Tana French, The Likeness, first edition rebound in 2020 in green leather with five raised bands, signed by the author on a new introduction limitation page.  Issued with a photo from the successful television adaptation.  Only twelve lettered copies.

French has been labelled the Queen of Irish Crime.  Her first two novels were shown on television in 2019.

This is the text of the introduction:

Crime fiction these past twenty years has been evolving, with skilled practitioners offering more psychological and chill-to-the-bone depth: unreliable narrators; past events throwing new light on current cases; participant observation with an undercover agent, and exposing familial and inter-generational tensions. Tana French, with the Dublin Murder Squad novels, offers all of these plot techniques and more. Her approach is to see each novel as a unique story of intrigue and revelation of a group of characters. The central police figures tend to suffer professional and personal crises. One does not know whether they will stay the course. And the investigations ask questions about the state of things, and particularly how to deal with a sense of being out of control.

French has different narrators in each novel, drawn from the fictitious Murder Squad, with its male culture and few women – although in The Likeness and The Trespasser the female tec’ tells the story. French is passionate about having the reader consider various viewpoints – within both the Squad and the story generally. It adds to the realism and builds the suspense and mystery.

It all started with the Edgar-winning debut In the Woods, published in 2007. This was rebound in a run of twelve copies in 2019.  Rob Ryan is the lead character and detective partner of Cassie Maddox; together they investigate the mystery of a girl murdered in the place where Ryan as a child was himself the sole survivor of a child murder scene. His disturbed soul is a clue to the present case. Admirably suspenseful, it set a benchmark for the rest of the six Murder Squad novels to date.

In The Likeness Cassie Maddox joins a commune of students as she assumes the identity of a look-alike murder victim. Tension crackles all the way through, between Cassie and her boss Frank and her new boyfriend Sam. But it’s the multi-layered closeness of the victim’s cohabitants that grounds the novel. Can Cassie deceive the others to get to the truth? As another person she finds out much more about herself. In this novel French can be compared to the Anglo-Irish mistress of suspense Elizabeth Bowen, adding moreover, a new edge to crime fiction.