Shutter Island [Hardcover]

Shutter Island is something of a departure for Dennis Lehane. It is not like the private eye novels with which he made his name and it is not especially like Mystic River, his distinguished crime novel about murder, loyalty and revenge. Instead, he gives us a classic of psychological suspense--US Marshal Teddy is summoned to a remote hospital for the criminally insane to look for a missing patient and finds his own future and sanity on the line. It is the 1950s and experiments with drugs, conditioning and brain surgery are all the rage both in the psychiatric profession and in the shadow world of government agencies.

Teddy rapidly becomes aware that no-one he is talking to is remotely telling him the truth and that he cannot be wholly sure even of his charming new partner. As the island hospital is isolated by a hurricane, we find ourselves unable to trust a single thing that the narrative tells us--Lehane displays a gift for sleight of hand which is showily disorienting. At the same time, this is not just a box of tricks. We find ourselves caring deeply for Teddy and his partner Chuck, whatever is going on and whoever they really are.--Roz Kaveney

'Lehane's new novel carries one of the most aesthetically right resolutions ever written...A tour de force'

'Chilling, thrilling and so clever you'll be chewing it over long after the final page'

'A psychological tour de force...Absolutely nothing is as it seems in this effortlessly complex twister'

In 1954, US Marshal Teddy Daniels and his partner Chuck Aule arrive at Ashcliffe Hospital, a federal mental institution for the criminally insane on a small island in Massachusetts' Outer Harbor. They have come to find an escaped patient, Rachel Solando, who has left a series of encoded clues. The more they investigate, the more they believe that Rachel has summoned them there. As a storm approaches, Teddy and Chuck fear they may have stumbled into a nightmare world of CIA drug trials, eugenics and mind control. And the more they learn, the more they fear that someone is trying to drive them insane...

Summer, 1954.

US Marshal Teddy Daniels has 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.

And neither is Teddy Daniels.

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

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

As the investigation deepens, the questions mount:

How has a barefoot woman escaped an island from a locked room?

Who is leaving them clues in the form of cryptic codes?

Why is there no record of a patient committed just one year before?

What really goes on in Ward C?

Why is an empty lighthouse surrounded by an electrified fence and armed guards?

The closer Teddy and Chuck get to the truth, the more elusive it becomes, and the more they begin to believe that they may never leave Shutter Island.

Because someone is trying to drive them insane . . .

Acclaim for Dennis Lehane:

'Boy, does he know how to write.' Elmore Leonard

'Marvellous . . . enormously impressive.' Observer

'The superb detective novels of Dennis Lehane became a kind of lifeline for me.' Stephen King

'Substantial and thought-provoking.' Sunday Telegraph

'Haunting and lyrical.' Harlan Coben

'Lehane's not as familiar a name as James Patterson or Michael Connolly, but he should be.Will keep even the sharpest thriller fan asking questions until the very last page.' Mirror

Dennis Lehane is the author of A DRINK BEFORE THE WAR (which won the Shamus Award for Best First Novel); DARKNESS, TAKE MY HAND; SACRED; GONE, BABY, GONE; PRAYERS FOR RAIN and MYSTIC RIVER. A native of Dorchester, Massachusetts he lives in the Boston area with his wife, Sheila, and their two English bulidogs, Marion and Stella.

TEDDY DANIELS'S FATHER had been a fisherman. He lost his boat to the bank in '31 when Teddy was eleven, spent the rest of his life hiring onto other boats when they had the work, unloading freight along the docks when they didn't, going long stretches when he was back at the house by ten in the morning, sitting in an armchair, staring at his hands, whispering to himself occasionally, his eyes gone wide and dark.
He'd taken Teddy out to the islands when Teddy was still a small boy, too young to be much help on the boat. All he'd been able to do was untangle the lines and tie off the hooks. He'd cut himself a few times, and the blood dotted his fingertips and smeared his palms.
They'd left in the dark, and when the sun appeared, it was a cold ivory that pushed up from the edge of the sea, and the islands appeared out of the fading dusk, huddled together, as if they'd been caught at something.
Teddy saw small, pastel-colored shacks lining the beach of one, a crumbling limestone estate on another. His father pointed out the prison on Deer Island and the stately fort on Georges. On Thompson, the high trees were filled with birds, and their chatter sounded like squalls of hail and glass.
Out past them all, the one they called Shutter lay like something tossed from a Spanish galleon. Back then, in the spring of '28, it had been left to itself in a riot of its own vegetation, and the fort that stretched along its highest point was strangled in vines and topped with great clouds of moss.
"Why Shutter?" Teddy asked.
His father shrugged. "You with the questions. Always the questions."
"Yeah, but why?"
"Some places just get a name and it sticks. Pirates probably."
"Pirates?" Teddy liked the sound of that. He could see them-big men with eye patches and tall boots, gleaming swords.
His father said, "This is where they hid in the old days." His arm swept the horizon. "These islands. Hid themselves. Hid their gold."
Teddy imagined chests of it, the coins spilling down the sides.
Later he got sick, repeatedly and violently, pitching black ropes of it over the side of his father's boat and into the sea.
His father was surprised because Teddy hadn't begun to vomit until hours into the trip when the ocean was flat and glistening with its own quiet. His father said, "It's okay. It's your first time. Nothing to be ashamed of."
Teddy nodded, wiped his mouth with a cloth his father gave him.
His father said, "Sometimes there's motion, and you can't even feel it until it climbs up inside of you."
Another nod, Teddy unable to tell his father that it wasn't motion that had turned his stomach.
It was all that water. Stretched out around them until it was all that was left of the world. How Teddy believed that it could swallow the sky. Until that moment, he'd never known they were this alone.
He looked up at his father, his eyes leaking and red, and his father said, "You'll be okay," and Teddy tried to smile.

His father went out on a Boston whaler in the summer of '38 and never came back. The next spring, pieces of the boat washed up on Nantasket Beach in the town of Hull, where Teddy grew up. A strip of keel, a hot plate with the captain's name etched in the base, cans of tomato and potato soup, a couple of lobster traps, gap-holed and misshapen.
They held the funeral for the four fishermen in St. Theresa's Church, its back pressed hard against the same sea that had claimed so many of its parishioners, and Teddy stood with his mother and heard testimonials to the captain, his first mate, and the third fisherman, an old salt named Gil Restak, who'd terrorized the bars of Hull since returning from the Great War with a shattered heel and too many ugly pictures in his head. In death, though, one of the bartenders he'd terrorized had said, all was forgiven.
The boat's owner, Nikos Costa, admitted that he'd barely known Teddy's father, that he'd hired on at the last minute when a crew member broke his leg in a fall from a truck. Still, the captain had spoken highly of him, said everyone in town knew that he could do a day's work. And wasn't that the highest praise one could give a man?
Standing in that church, Teddy remembered that day on his father's boat because they'd never gone out again. His father kept saying they would, but Teddy understood that he said this only so his son could hold on to some pride. His father never acknowledged what had happened that day, but a look had passed between them as they headed home, back through the string of islands, Shutter behind them, Thompson still ahead, the city skyline so clear and close you'd think you could lift a building by its spire.
"It's the sea," his father said, a hand lightly rubbing Teddy's back as they leaned against the stern. "Some men take to it. Some men it takes."
And he'd looked at Teddy in such a way that Teddy knew which of those men he'd probably grow up to be.