Shutter Island

Source: Product Description

The year is 1954. U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his new ­partner, Chuck Aule, have come to Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, to investigate the disappearance of a patient. Multiple-murderess Rachel Solando is loose somewhere on this barren island, despite having been kept in a locked cell under constant surveillance. As a killer hurricane bears relentlessly down on them, a strange case takes on even darker, more sinister shades—with hints of radical experimentation, horrifying surgeries, and lethal countermoves made in the cause of a covert shadow war. No one is going to escape Shutter Island unscathed, because nothing at Ashecliffe Hospital is remotely what it seems.

Teddy and Chuck begin questioning everyone at the hospital, only to come up empty-handed until the absence of a certain doctor and the discovery of a hand-written riddle found in Rachel's room become their first clues in a strange case that's as twisted and violent as the criminals on Shutter Island.

With a storm hitting the island, Teddy and Chuck race to find the violent woman who went missing and uncover the secrets harbored on Shutter Island, but the closer they get to the truth is that much closer they will be to their own madness, as someone plans on keeping the pair on the island for good.

WOW! `Shutter Island' is so good that I'm at a loss for words to describe how good it is. The main mystery of the missing woman grabs you on page one, and pulls you deeper into the web of lies and murder that surrounds it with each turn of the page. The characters are rich and colorful, and each development in the plot ratchets up the tension until you reach the explosive climax.

Dennis Lehane has-done-it-again...another page-turning bestseller that further proves him a master storyteller. I have loved all of Lehane's novels, but `Shutter Island' is one of his, if not THE best he has written, and that's saying a lot considering all his books are among the best crime novels out there.

This is definitely a MUST READ!

Nick Gonnella

Teddy and Chuck wonder how the woman could escape from a locked room on the third floor with guards all over the place and no hideaways on the island itself and swimming the distance to the nearest land in the treacherous Atlantic seems monumental. A hurricane is coming, which when it hits will totally isolate the island from the mainland. They begin to find evidence of illegal drug therapy and surgery, but little about the vanished Rachel. As they uncover more proof of wrongdoing Teddy and Chuck wonder if they will get off the island alive.

Highly regarded Dennis Lehane may have written the best police procedural and thriller of the year. Plenty of action, several mysteries that feels like a Moebius string as each sub-mystery seems inside one another, and strong characterization including flashbacks to Teddy's tragically deceased spouse make for a great read. On top of a powerful story line with a deep cast and a feel for how society dealt with mental illness during the early Eisenhower red scare era, the climax is as good as a novel gets. If a reader can afford one book, SHUTTER ISLAND is a terrific choice.

Harriet Klausner

This is precisely what Dennis Lehane does with SHUTTER ISLAND, a book very different from what he has done in the past and also different from what others laboring mightily in the mystery and suspense idiom have done. Lehane made his bones with five novels featuring the duo of Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro. His last novel, MYSTIC RIVER, was a departure from those characters but still covered the same territory that Lehane has demonstrated an intimate familiarity with, that being modern-day, working class Boston, through the prism of the detective novel. SHUTTER ISLAND is a totally different animal.

SHUTTER ISLAND takes place not in 2003 but in 1954 and not in Boston but in view of it --- in Ashecliffe Hospital --- located on Shutter Island, an island with a history dating back to the Civil War. The tale is told through the eyes of U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels, the son of a fisherman, a man whose life has been marked by tragic violence and sorrow suffered in quiet silence. When we meet Daniels, he is on his way to Ashecliffe Hospital to investigate the disappearance of Rachel Solando, one of the patients. Her disappearance is significant because Ashecliffe is not an ordinary hospital, but a treatment and holding center for the criminally insane. The island is accessible only by ferry and there is simply nowhere that Solando could have gone.

However, as Daniels and Chuck Aule, his newly acquired partner, begin their investigation, it is immediately apparent that all is not right. The doctors who run the hospital are not entirely cooperative, the assistant warden seems to be more obstructive than not and the warden is an enigmatic character who, within the brief period in which the reader makes his acquaintance, is quite frightening. But to say that nothing or no one on SHUTTER ISLAND is as it or they seem to be is an understatement. And when Solando reappears as suddenly as she vanished, it is a signal that the mystery is only beginning. But SHUTTER ISLAND is more, far more, than a mystery novel. The last chapter of this book will cause you to read it again and again, and then reread the entire novel. All is revealed, yet all remains obscure.

SHUTTER ISLAND is a genre-bending novel that is as absorbing a book as you are likely to read this year, combining the best elements of Agatha Christie, Eric Ambler, Philip K. Dick and Dennis Lehane. Readers will be discussing this novel --- and its ultimate revelation --- for quite some time. Very highly recommended.

--- Reviewed by Joe Hartlaub