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Shutter Island

Name: Shutter Island
Author: Dennis Lehane
ISBN: 9788478718672

by Dennis Lehane, Maria Via

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Overview

"Anyone dazzled by Dennis Lehane's Mystic River will be completely blown away by Shutter Island....Deeply atmospheric." —San Francisco Chronicle

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.

Synopsis

Summer, 1954.

U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels s come to Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Along with his partner, Chuck Aule, he sets out to find an escaped patient, a murderess named Rachel Solando, as a hurricane bears down upon them.

But nothing at Ashecliffe Hospital is what it seems.

Is he there to find a missing patient? Or has he been sent to look into rumors of Ashecliffe's radical approach to psychiatry; an approach that may include drug experimentation, hideous surgical trials, and lethal countermoves in the shadow war against Soviet brainwashing ...

Or is there another, more personal reason why he has come there?

As the investigation deepens, the questions only mount. The closer Teddy and Chuck get to the truth, the more elusive it becomes, and the more they begin to believe that they my never leave Shutter Island.

Because someone is trying to drive them insane ...

The Denver Post

Shutter Island is a tremendously satisfying thriller. The suspense is molasses-thick with a plot that will keep you guessing. Lehane doesn't miss a trick. It's a great, fun read, and then there's that ending. You're sure to talk about this one over lunch. — Tom Walker

About the Author, Dennis Lehane

Boston and its environs are the setting for most of Dennis Lehane s fiction. From gritty inner-city motels to the lavish suburbs, Lehane brings a Boston subculture and its vivid characters to life in his detective novels. Lehane fans return time and time again for his tense psychological thrillers that chip away at secrets deep within the human soul.

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Editorials

From Barnes & Noble

The Barnes & Noble Review
In a masterful departure from the Boston-based hard-boiled mysteries he's known for, New York Times bestselling author Dennis Lehane (Mystic River) offers an atmospheric psychological thriller set in a 1950s asylum for the criminally insane. It's 1954, and up-and-coming U.S. marshal Teddy Daniels is assigned to investigate the disappearance of a patient from Shutter Island's Ashecliffe Hospital. He'd been gunning for an assignment on the island for reasons of his own -- but before long he wonders whether he hasn't been brought there as part of a twisted plot by hospital doctors whose radical treatments range from unethical to illegal to downright sinister. Teddy's code-breaking skills soon provide a promising lead, but the hospital refuses him access to records he suspects would break the case wide open. As a hurricane cuts off communication with the mainland, more dangerous criminals "escape" in the confusion, and the puzzling, improbable clues proliferate, Teddy begins to doubt everything -- his memory, his partner, even his own sanity. Sue Stone

The Boston Globe

If you're in the mood for mind games, Shutter Island is an engrossing read. — Sam Allis

The Denver Post

The New York Times

The atmosphere is properly dark and moody, and so long as Teddy and Chuck stick to the manhunt and their investigation of Ashecliffe's creepy medical staff, they play their roles with muscle and grace. — Marilyn Stasio

The Washington Post

To read Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island is to enter a nightmare of madness, violence and deception. To finish the novel -- and it would be criminal even to hint at its ending -- is to be disoriented, perhaps angered, and finally to reflect on the ability of a master storyteller to play havoc with our minds. If we could bring back Edgar Allan Poe and equip him with today's postmodern bag of tricks, he might give us a tale as unexpected and unsettling as Shutter Island. — Patrick Anderson

USA Today

It has the headlong suspense and whopper of a story you would expect in any well-made thriller. — Joseph Barbato

Publishers Weekly

Boston-area novelist Lehane has written a terrific suspense novel, an impressive follow-up to 2001's Mystic River. Shutter Island is off Massachusetts's coast, an army facility turned hospital for the criminally insane. When a beautiful-and certifiably crazy-patient escapes, U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his partner, Chuck Aule, are called in to investigate. Embroiled in uncertainties and mystery, the two soon learn there's much more at stake than simply finding one missing woman. Stechschulte gives a stirring performance. His portrayal of Daniels is convincing, and he reads the role with equal parts poignancy and toughness. Stechschulte is particularly adept at reading dialogue. For example, one stormy night at the hospital, Teddy and Chuck are playing cards with two of the hospital's workers. The quartet banters, calling each other's bluffs and having a grand old time, yet tones of racism underlie the conversation. Stechschulte handles the dialogue well, distinguishing between each voice and varying the pace between rapid back-and-forth and thoughtful, drawn out remarks. Simultaneous release with the Morrow hardcover (Forecasts, Apr. 7). (Apr.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Library Journal

This crime thriller is probably Lehane's best book to date. Off the coast of Massachusetts is rather grim, gray, and forbidding Shutter Island, a penal colony for the criminally insane. Federal marshals Teddy Daniels and Chuck Aule are sent there to find a woman prisoner who has apparently disappeared. But how and where did she go? The island is heavily guarded, as is the twice-weekly supply ferry. Teddy also has another agenda: he seeks the man who killed his wife two years ago. Things are not what they seem as Chuck and Teddy, plagued by migraines and nightmares, dig deeper into the secrets that the island holds. Things reach such a pitch that you don't know whom to believe, which all leads to an ending worthy of Agatha Christie or O. Henry. [A film version, directed by Martin Scorsese, is being released in February 2010 —Ed.] Highly recommended for all public libraries. [LJ 5/1/03]
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Library Journal

This audio adaptation of Lehane's (Mystic River) new novel takes place in 1954 at an island hospital for the criminally insane just outside Boston. U.S. Federal Marshall Teddy Daniels is sent to Shutter Island to find an escaped killer; however, Teddy has two other tasks as well: locate the killer of his wife and investigate reports of the hospital's experiments with drugs and surgery as a means of mind control. All of this occurs as a hurricane sweeps across the island. This work, read by Tom Stechschulte, establishes a gripping, paranoid feeling, with several plot twists that hold the listener's attention. Lehane has created a cast of characters who may not be what they seem. An excellent thriller; recommended for all audio collections.-Stephen L. Hupp, West Virginia Univ., Parkersburg Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Kirkus Reviews

A pair of US Marshals are sent to an island-bound institution for the criminally insane to find an escaped murderer--in Lehane’s lollapalooza of a corkscrew thriller. The Cold War is simmering and a hurricane approaching the Massachusetts coast when Edward Daniels and Charles Aule, his new partner, arrive at Ashecliffe Hospital in 1954, the morning after Rachel Solando, a housewife who drowned her three children, has gone AWOL. How did she get out of the third-floor room she’d been locked into two hours earlier without disturbing the door or windows or any of the three orderlies between her and the outdoors? Other false notes seem even more disturbing. Rachel has left behind a series of tantalizingly cryptic clues as to her fate. Chief of staff Dr. John Cawley, Rachel’s psychiatrist, refuses to share his notes on her, his personnel files, or the treatment files of Dr. Lester Sheehan, her group therapist, who left for his vacation on the ferry that brought Teddy Daniels and Chuck Aule to the island. And the two marshals have brought baggage of their own: Teddy’s hunt for an arsonist he’s convinced is an Ashecliffe inmate and Chuck’s suspicion that the patients are being used as guinea pigs for some villainous new psychotropics. Inevitably, the hunters become the hunted, dissatisfied with reports that Rachel Solando has returned, determined to get to the bottom of the mind-altering experiments being carried out in the dread Lighthouse, separated from each other by natural and human assaults, and sought far more urgently by the ultra-secretive authorities than the woman they came to find. Will Cawley and company succeed in having them declared incompetent and preventing them from escaping?After an extraordinarily humane series of neo-noirs (Mystic River, 2001, etc.), Lehane has produced a brilliantly far-fetched page-turner that’s sure to be the most talked-about thriller of the year.