Fans of Alex Michaelides’ bestselling thrillers The Silent Patient and The Maidens will be delighted that he’s returned with another notably unreliable narrator: Elliot Chase, a playwright who takes the famous Shakespeare quote “All the world’s a stage” quite literally in The Fury, a tantalizing slow burn murder mystery told as a play in five acts.
As befits an artist of his ilk, Elliot has a flair for the dramatic and an enthusiasm for gossipy speculation. When it comes to his own motivations, however, he is far more elusive—slippery, even—thanks to childhood wounds never fully acknowledged or healed, and present-day jealousies he attempts to stifle, with mixed results.
In The Fury, he has readers’ undivided attention, and he’s going to unapologetically enjoy it. “And before you accuse me of telling my story in a labyrinthine manner, let me remind you this is a true story—and in real life, that’s how we communicate, isn’t it?” Perhaps . . . or this is just a sly form of obfuscation from a seasoned dramatist. After all, he plainly states, “We are all the unreliable narrators of our own lives.”
Elliot’s best friend, movie megastar Lana Farrar, owns a remote Greek island named Aura. She hosts Elliot, her husband and son, and her longtime stage actress friend, Kate, for a luxurious Easter holiday. But Aegean winds known as “the fury” batter the island and cut them off from civilization for the duration of the storm. It is then that one of them is murdered, and all of them become suspects.
The British Cypriot Michaelides has cited Greek mythology and Agatha Christie as important influences; in The Fury he draws on elements of both as he creates a darkly immersive atmosphere rife with creeping dread, heightened passion and numerous dubious alibis. There is plenty of paranoid suspense, too, in this inventive take on a locked-room mystery that reminds us people are far more complex than they seem to be—or we would like them to be—for better or (murderously) worse.
