The Fury

The Fury is Alex Michaelides’s third novel, published in 2024 by Celadon Books. Michaelides emerged as a formidable psychological thriller author with his first novel, The Silent Patient, which debuted at #1 on the New York Times Bestseller List and is currently being adapted into a feature film. His second novel, The Maidens, was also a New York Times bestseller, and The Fury was chosen by Amazon as its Editor Pick for January of 2024. Michaelides, who was a screenwriter before he became a novelist, is known for his exploration of classic murder mystery conventions and twisting plots that evoke parallels to Agatha Christie and Alfred Hitchcock. Michaelides was born and raised in the island country of Cyprus, and in The Fury, he draws upon his background to create a rich and layered narrative.

This guide refers to the e-book version of the text, published in 2024 by Celadon Books.

Content Warning: This guide describes and analyzes the source text’s depiction of psychological manipulation, drug addiction, alcohol addiction, and murder; it also briefly mentions suicide.

Plot Summary

The Fury is split into five acts, bookended by a Prologue and an Epilogue. In each act, the protagonist and narrator, a man named Elliot Chase, reveals the story of a murder in layers, returning repeatedly to the night of the murder with added information that shifts perspective on the story.

With the opening of Act 1, Elliot warns the reader that although they may have heard about the infamous murder story he is about to tell, they have never heard the truth. He begins by introducing his friend Lana Farrar, a famous movie star, who decides to take her friends and family to the Greek island her first husband bought for her. She calls her friend Kate Crosby to invite her, along with Lana’s husband Jason Miller, her son Leo, her housekeeper Agathi, and Elliot.

On the first morning on the island, Elliot is woken by gunshots because Jason is hunting. The rest of them spend the day on the beach, but Kate sneaks away to meet with Jason, with whom she is having an affair. They kiss, but Jason has the feeling someone is watching them.

That night, Agathi wakes to the sound of gunshots. She runs out of the house and follows the sound to an ancient ruin, where she sees the rest of the group gathered around Lana’s dead body.

In Act 2, Elliot returns to the beginning, when Lana decides to take her friends and family to Greece. He admits that instead of calling Kate immediately upon having the idea, Lana calls her a day later. When Agathi arrives home from the dry cleaners with an earring that they found on Jason’s jacket, Lana decides to ask Kate for advice. While waiting in Kate’s dressing room, she finds the earring that matches the one the dry cleaner found and realizes that Kate is having an affair with Jason. That night, she visits Elliot, who suggests that Lana invite Jason and Kate to the island to confront them.

On the island, Lana tells Jason to choose between herself and Kate, but Jason turns his anger on Elliot. Lana goes to the caretaker’s cottage and asks him for help. She shocks Nikos with her request, but he agrees. After Lana leaves Nikos’s cottage, she goes to the ruin. Three gunshots ring out, and Lana drops to the ground. Agathi calls the Mykonos police, but because of the storm, they can’t come to the island until morning.

In Act 3, Elliot tells the reader about his childhood. His parents were abusive and neglectful, and he was bullied terribly at school. He began going to the movies instead of school, and that’s where he was introduced to the power of theater, and Lana, for the first time. After he ran away from home, he met Barbara West, a novelist, and moved in with her. He remade himself, even giving himself a new name: Elliot Chase. At a party one night with Barbara, Elliot met Lana.

Elliot nurtured his new relationship with Lana carefully and became an intimate friend. One night, they kissed, and Elliot knew that Lana was his destiny. However, on the night he planned to propose, she met Jason, and after a few months, they got married. Elliot and Kate, who was dating Jason when Lana met him, attended the wedding together.

At this point, Elliot admits that he knew early on that Jason and Kate were having an affair, but rather than tell Lana, he followed them and took notes on their meetings. Back in the past, he plants Kate’s earring on Jason’s jacket to force Lana to discover the affair, but when they talk that night, he realizes that she will not leave Jason. Elliot begins to make a plan to destroy Jason.

The night that Lana is shot on the island, he waits beside her body with Agathi until everyone else leaves. When Lana sits up, they tell Agathi that they faked her death and ask her to go along with the plan.

In Act 4, Elliot admits that he convinced Lana that faking her death would put Jason and Kate’s relationship under pressure, thus ending it. However, he had another plan that he didn’t share with her.

The night of Lana’s fake death, she goes to the ruin and meets Elliot there. He fires a shotgun into the air while she applies makeup and fake blood. Leo is in on the plan, and when the rest of them arrive, he reacts so realistically that even Elliot believes it. After she talks to Agathi, however, Lana decides to stop the plan. When Elliot admits his love for her, she cruelly rejects him.

Elliot leaves and goes to Kate, determined to finish his plan. She is on her way to talk to Jason, and Elliot gives her a loaded gun, ostensibly for protection, but hoping that she will kill Jason. He insinuates that Jason killed Lana because he mistook her for Kate and sends her to meet Jason at the jetty. Elliot stands back in the woods to watch, but Nikos points a gun at him and forces him out onto the jetty. They force Elliot to his knees and try to force him to shoot himself, until Kate finally puts her hand over his and squeezes the trigger.

In Act 5, Elliot returns to the morning after Lana discovered Jason’s affair. When Lana wakes up on Elliot’s couch, she finds his notebook with the lists of Jason and Kate’s meeting times, as well as a plan to fake her death. She goes to Kate’s house and confronts her about the affair. Disturbed by Elliot’s plan, they decide to make their own.

On the island, they tell everyone but Jason about the plan. Lana watches from a distance as Kate pulls the trigger on the gun, which is full of blanks. When Elliot wakes up, Kate shows him the prop gun, and then the group walks away, leaving him on the beach alone. Elliot becomes filled with rage and walks back to the ruin. He finds the shotgun he left there after faking Lana’s death and returns to the house, where he kills Lana.

In the Epilogue, Elliot reveals that he is telling this story from prison, on his therapist’s advice. He also tells the reader that after Barbara’s death, he stole a play she wrote and put his name on it. As it turns out, he isn’t even a writer.