I had watched the Shutter Island movie a long time ago and remember having loved it, so picking up the novel by Dennis Lehane was easy. Few years after WW2, US Marshals Teddy Daniels and Chuck Aule arrive on the desolate Shutter Island to investigate a mysterious disappearance. The island off the Boston coast houses a securely guarded mental hospital for the criminally insane. After getting introduced to the deputy warden McPherson and the head Dr. Crawley, the Marshals examine the room of the missing patient Rachel Solando. She seems to have disappeared overnight from her locked room with no trace, only leaving behind a code. The Marshals start to explore the hospital facilities and the island and discover a highly secure ward where secret experiments are performed on patients. A tremendous hurricane hits the island, disabling ferry access and radio communication, killing power to the facilities and unleashing the dangerous patients. By the time the dangerous inmates are all locked back up, Teddy seems to have uncovered the dark secret of the hospital and his wife’s killer Andrew Laeddis.
The slow build of intrigue and darkness in this book is relentless and exciting. As we learn every new detail of the island, hospital, staff or patients, our mystery only deepens on how Rachel disappeared (and later reappeared) and the nature of the experiments at the hospital. Teddy is a WW2 veteran and his PTSD of witnessing the Nazi concentration camps, migraine attacks and flashbacks of his loving wife Dolores, who was killed in a fire, highly clouds his judgement in this case. The 3 acts in the book are perfect, with a satisfyingly firecracking twist at the end. This was a deliciously scary and mysterious read!
Rating: 4/5
ISBN: 9780063072930