Find Your Chances

Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane

Read: December 2008

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 remote and 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 what it seems. But then neither is Teddy Daniels.

My thoughts:

I find all the Dennis Lehane books I have read to be fast paced and page turners. Shutter Island is no exception. Once again, Lehane takes readers to Massachusetts–I’m convinced he can’t write about any other setting or being a Boston boy, does not want to–and lays out an intriguing mystery.

Still, I find Lehane’s writing to be cryptic at times and hard to follow. If there is one lesson I have learned, it’s to read his text closely. He drops a lot of hints about the mystery, but it’s only in retrospect that you understand his cryptic text. With Lehane, you know you will be surprised by the outcome or at least impressed with his storytelling.

I primarily read the book because it is being made into a movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Mark Ruffalo, and Ben Kingsley and directed by Martin Scorsese. I ALWAYS try to read the book before I go see the movie (and was disappointed when I saw the Gone, Baby, Gone movie before reading the book. Usually, the book is better, but it’s hard to top Leo (and Mark too)