Alex Michaelides, who is best known for his blockbuster first novel, “The Silent Patient,” has a devoted following and a knack for explosive, change-everything revelations. He sets THE FURY (Celadon, 298 pp., $28.99) on a private Greek island where Lana Farrar, a stunningly beautiful British movie star, has gathered a small party of relatives and frenemies.
The foreshadowing is afoot. The wind is gathering force. Naturally, the weather will render the island unreachable, and the author will render a character dead. “This is a tale of murder,” the narrator, an unpleasant playwright named Elliot Chase, intones in the first sentence.
As he often reminds us, Elliot is unreliable. “I’m a sly one, aren’t I?” he says. He’s fond of portentous pronouncements and banal observations presented as piercing insights (“Never let it be said that an Englishman’s home is not his castle”).
The book name-drops a dizzying array of writers and playwrights, and takes as its epigraph the classic opening line of Ford Madox Ford’s “The Good Soldier” (“This is the saddest story I have ever heard”). But Michaelides undercuts his ambitions with a flabby plot and uneven pacing that ricochets between plodding and breakneck. The characters are unbelievable. The payoff is anticlimactic. The chapters end with simple declarative sentences dressed up as cliffhangers: “Smiling to herself, Kate emptied the cocaine onto the bedside table. Then she pulled out her credit card and started chopping it up.”
Whodunit, and why? Who cares? Reading this novel is like seeing a play where the actors yell at you and spray you with water while repeatedly announcing that theirs is a tragic tale.
“The Fury” refers to a malign Aegean wind. But don’t be surprised if it also describes your mood when you finish this book.
With their potential for identity-swapping, quasi-telepathic communication and corrosive jealousy, twins make fascinating subjects for psychological thrillers. The 22-year-old twins in Abbott Kahler’s WHERE YOU END (Holt, 321 pp., $27.99) are particularly intriguing specimens.
Kat and Jude Bird are “mirror image twins” — one is right-handed and the other left-handed, for instance — and unusually close. “No one but identical twins begin life as the same exact person, and only mirror twins cleave together as long as nature will allow, parting almost reluctantly in the womb,” Kat thinks.
When Kat lapses into a coma after an accident, Jude intuits that her sister’s consciousness is receding, in a “slow chalkboard erasing of people and places and events.” When Kat wakes up with no memory of the past, it’s up to Jude to fill in the blanks. “Only I can remake her,” she thinks. But why does Jude’s account seem so fake?
The book is exquisitely written and you’ll ache for the sisters, despite their extreme behavior and a plot that sometimes wanders off the road and into the woods. Kat and Jude are a mesmerizing pair. Do they have a secret language, and can they slip into each other’s identities? Yes they do, and yes they can.
It all seems to be going so well for Evie Porter. The narrator of Ashley Elston’s FIRST LIE WINS (Pamela Dorman Books, 340 pp., $28) has just moved in with her boyfriend, a hunky Louisiana businessman named Ryan Sumner. Sadly for him, their relationship is likely to be short-lived, because she’s a criminal and he’s her latest mark.
But then a friend of Ryan’s turns up with his new girlfriend, a woman who looks uncannily like Evie and who introduces herself as Lucca Marino — which happens to be Evie’s real name. Why has this woman stolen her identify, and who sent her?
Aside from her sketchy job, which involves doing miscellaneous tasks — theft, blackmail and the like — for a shadowy boss named Mr. Smith, Evie makes for a winning, nimble character. Elston raises the stakes with unexpected developments: a fatal car accident that might have been murder; a visit from the police, interested in Evie’s possible role in an earlier killing; and some suspect behavior from Mr. Smith, who keeps Evie off-balance by concealing his identity and obscuring his long-term plans. “The job is always real, but you may not always be aware of what the end goal is,” he tells her.
Intriguingly, Ryan has some secrets of his own. Every Thursday he goes someplace to attend to the less savory aspects of his business.
“I don’t scare easily,” Ryan says, when the police come calling for Evie. “Plus, my skill set may come in handy in a pinch.”
