Dublin-based writer Tana French follows last year?s hit debut novel In the Woods with The Likeness, another literary crime stonker

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Your narrator, Cassie, is an undercover detective who discovers a murder victim is her doppelganger – and assumes her identity to find out who killed her. Where the heck did that idea come from?

Me and a bunch of mates were in the pub – the genesis of most Irish writers’ stories! – and we started talking about how we’d all been told we had a double out there, but no-one had ever come face to face with them.

So I started thinking how that would challenge your sense of identity... and then, what if you only met your double too late, when they were dead, and the only way to find out who she was, was to become her?

Why did you decide ­psychological crime ­fiction was going to be your thing?

I think it started with Donna Tartt’s The Secret History, which was a real literary novel and a cracking mystery, too. It’s no coincidence that me and a lot of new literary crime writers, like Sophie Hannah, are of an age where we were reading that when it first came out – it made you realise it’s possible to have a good page-turner with characters who leap off the page.

The book is stuffed with detail about police ­procedure. Did you ­research for ages?

I didn’t know how the book was going to end, so I did running research. There’s this amazing retired detective on the Irish police force who answered my mad questions and told me stories, which were crucially important, because the huge moment in an investigation might not be when you put on the handcuffs; it might be later when you see a victim’s mother outside court, or before, when you realise an alibi is finally going to come clean. I also have a doctor friend who was useful; I’d ask him things like, if you needed to kill someone in a way that would take the victim about 20 minutes to die, how would you do it?

If you didn’t know how you were going to end the book, when did you decide on the murderer?