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Excerpt

Readers approach an established author with expectations. Not that
there's anything wrong with that. Those expectations help keep
readers familiar with the author, while recommending the author to
friends and attending book signings --- all of those good things.
So what does one do when a favorite author not only steps away from
established characters, but also takes a familiar genre… and
tinkers with it a bit, and thus transforms it into something
else?

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.