"The Fury" by Alex Michaelides

Alex Michaelides’s newest murder mystery involves 4 main characters: a retired movie star, her husband, a London theater actress and a playwright who is also the narrator of the story. While I enjoyed the unusual structure of the book, it also irritated me or more accurately, made me anxious as I never knew what was coming. The unreliable narrator tells a story with an unreliable structure. The experience was akin to reading a “what if” book. The narrator would lead you down a path just to state a couple of chapters later: sorry, that is how it was supposed to go, now let me tell you what really happened. 

More and more of the real picture - if such a thing is possible - was revealed with every unexpected turn or with a change of perspective. It is at its core a closed circle murder mystery, with the entire cast of characters secluded on a remote Greek island. However, once the murder actually happens (yes, there are a few intentional false starts), there is no mystery as to who committed it. 

I am giving this book 3 stars because I really disliked the main character and narrator, Elliot. I did not even feel pity towards him, although I wanted to. The author calls him a psychopath a few times in the novel. However, (and I don't know how true this is since the narrator is unreliable), Elliot suffered a lot of abuse, parental neglect and bullying in his childhood and younger years. I certainly could not blame him for seizing the day when he met a famous female writer, who took him under her wing. I could not, however, understand a lot of his motivations. Perhaps that is how psychopaths are supposed to act. But also feel that humanity utterly failed with this lonely man if what he described about his past really happened. So while an exercise of writing an entire novel from a perspective of someone who could or could not be a psychopath is interesting, I just can't get a higher rating to the book where the entire narrative could be distorted because presented through the eyes of someone who is mentally ill.