When it comes to keeping readers satisfied, no novelist has a smaller margin for error than the writer of so-called "literary thrillers." It's like trying to have one's literary cake and eat it too: snobs will indulge in a finely tuned police procedural only if spared the infelicities of genre prose; mystery addicts with little patience for belletristic snooze-fests are wary of buying product cut with subtlety, insight, and a lack of adverbs. It's no wonder Booker winner John Banville decided to write his mystery novels under a pen name: it was a pre-emptive strike against haters from both sides.

The latest author to pull off this delicate balance happens to be Banville's countrywoman (most of the pre-eminent writers in the subgenre are, notably, European), and the state of affairs in contemporary Irish life is very much in the foreground of Tana French's writing. The narrator of The Likeness, which picks up six months after the events of French's Edgar-winning In the Woods, is Cassie Maddox, a murder detective who played a supporting role in the first book. She is thrust into an undercover assignment based on a highly implausible (but immensely compelling) conceit: a body is discovered that looks exactly like Cassie, with an ID bearing the name Alexandra — aka Lexie — Madison, an undercover alias Cassie used years before. Her bosses see an opportunity to solve the mystery of both this woman's identity and that of her killer by seamlessly inserting Cassie back into Lexie's life, as if she'd survived the attack. When Lexie returns to the decrepit mansion she shares with four fellow graduate students, they look like they've seen a ghost — and with good reason, it turns out.

As the story unfolds, themes that might be subordinate (or even nonexistent) in a lesser novel share the stage with the whodunit at the heart of the book, ranging from the shadow cast by Ireland's colonial past to the tensions between individual, community, and society. In the end, these concerns and the procedural conventions of the plot feel equally organic and necessary — everyone gets their cake, but no one goes hungry.

-Chris Parris-Lamb