Amid the ferocious winds on a small and idyllic Greek island owned by the reclusive movie star Lana Farrar, a murder occurs. With only seven people on the island, the six possible suspects are left scrambling in the wake of the tragedy, trying desperately to understand what exactly happened.

What occurs next is nothing short of a destructive mania; a fever dream where we seem to live the murder again and again as our narrator, Elliot Chase – Lana’s friend and a possible suspect himself, to whom we are akin to a confidante – tries to make sense of what he has witnessed. Yet all the while, he makes us as readers question repeatedly whether the story that we are being fed is in fact the truth.

A master craftsman, Alex Michaelides is in complete control as the story unfolds. He unravels it with such precision, peeling back the layers of each character, each interaction, and all that leads up to that fateful night. The night when one dies and then the rest completely and utterly implode.

While not necessarily a fast-paced or action-packed novel, The Fury is a deeply compelling read. Michaelides wanders, letting you stand in the centre as he weaves between philosophical musings and seemingly innocuous comments – only to snap, bringing together all the threads in a perfect harmony, leaving you gasping.

During the novel, Elliot Chase states that this is less of a whodunnit and more of a, as he coins it, ‘whydunnit’. He is well justified in this description. The Fury is a profound examination of how character forms and then twists, of how we fall prey to our own grandiosities and, moreover, how ego feeds it all.