Thank you to NetGalley and Celadon Books for the ARC of The Fury.

I credit Alex Michaelides' first thriller The Silent Patient for getting me back into reading, however I have been massively disappointed by two subsequent thrillers he has written, first The Maidens and now The Fury.

A postive aspect of this book is Michaelides' ability to world build. The settings of both London and the private Greek island were vivid and definitely placed me in the world of the novel.

The biggest aspect of this book and a pattern Michaelides has in all of his thrillers is the female character(s) are truly obsessed with the men in their lives when the men are actively causing harm to these women and the people around them. That may be a point of these books, but I feel it would be more interesting and compelling as the reader to understand the women's why for loving them more than just

"they provide me attention and affection" and/or "they have daddy issues."

What are the men's good moments, if there are any? If there aren't, let's get to the root of the woman's why a bit more. I struggled to understand any of the female character's motivations for their actions and reactions when it came to the love interest of his novel, which made me fail to understand a large portion of the plot.

The pacing of this novel left a lot to be desired. It's a short novel, and I found myself speed reading to find the point. The story would progress and then you'd find out in the next chapter that none of the events that happened in the previous chapter actually happened. It just left me, the reader, feeling like "okay then why did you put me through this?" I like a book with an unreliable narrator, but I think this could have been executed in different and more effective ways. See Hanya Yanagihara's The People in the Trees with the usage of an additional character being the "editor" of the main character's compilation of diary entries and providing footnotes with additional context or differing "facts." Something similar could have been done by

having Mariana, Elliot's therapist and main character of Michaelides' previous novel The Maidens, provide additional context or be a conduit for Elliot's story. This would also make Mariana's addition in the book and the linking of all the novel's worlds more intentional and less cheeky.

It was also, sadly, a bit predictable.

There's a reason the book was written in Elliot's perspective, so obviously he would be the one to kill Lana. Also, there was too much left in the book when she "died" initially so I saw the red herring death coming

. Because of the predictability, I was made less interested in the novel as a whole.

While I love The Silent Patient, I think that Alex Michaelides may not be for me as a whole. If this is your first Michaelides book, you may find The Fury more enjoyable than I did. However, I personally would not recommend this book to any thriller lover.