From 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.Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From AudioFile
In 1993, Dr. Lester Sheehan begins a journal to remember "Teddy and his poor dead wife. . . and those twin terrors, Rachel Solando and Andrew Laeddis." With this narrative device in place, the story flashes back to 1954, to Shutter Island's Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane. U.S. Marshall Teddy Daniels is called after a female inmate vanishes from a locked room. One difference between simply listening and having a listening experience is Tom Stechschulte. He doesn't merely perform characters; he channels them. Main characters, doctors, nurses, inmates, and orderlies have believable individual voices and personalities. Lehane twists a devastating hurricane, possible unethical experiments, and enough secrets to justify paranoia into a psychological thriller that works most of the time. Stechschulte's magic makes it work the rest. S.J.H. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award © AudioFile 2003, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
Lehane is red hot--his Mystic River (2001) is currently being filmed by Clint Eastwood--and he returns with another blistering page-turner. It's 1954, and U.S. Marshals Teddy Daniels and Chuck Aule arrive at a small island in Massachusetts' Outer Harbor. It is home to Ashcliffe Hospital, a federal institution for the criminally insane, and one of the patients has escaped. Although the two men are new partners, they have already developed a wry, jocular relationship while also swapping personal, painful details. Daniels' lost his much-loved wife two years prior in a fire, while Aule requested a transfer out of Seattle after being harassed over his personal relationship with a Japanese American woman. After interviewing the hospital's medical personnel, both men have the feeling they are being stonewalled, especially by the director, who seems to alternate between a cold authoritarianism and a sudden and sweeping compassion. When the island is hit by gale-force winds and Aule disappears, Daniels must go it alone, beset by the fear that he has been fed psychotropic drugs and the belief that the hospital is performing radical brain surgery as part of a secret-ops program. Lehane throws in one mind-bending plot twist after another in a psychological thriller that will leave readers in suspense right up to the end. A master of the adroit psychological detail, Lehane makes the horrors of the mean streets pale in comparison to the workings of the human mind. Joanne Wilkinson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved


Book Description

Summer, 1954.

U.S. 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.

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 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 ...

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 ...


About the Author
Dennis Lehane is the author of the New York Times bestseller Mystic River; Prayers for Rain; Gone, Baby, Gone; Sacred; Darkness, Take My Hand; and A Drink Before the War, which won the Shamus Award for Best First Novel. A native of Dorchester, Massachusetts, he lives in the Boston area.

FROM OUR EDITORS

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

FROM THE PUBLISHER

"Summer, 1954. U.S. 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 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: How has a barefoot woman escaped the island from a locked room? Who is leaving clues in the form of cryptic codes? Why is there no record of a patient committed there 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.

FROM THE CRITICS

USA Today

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

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

The Boston Globe

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

The Denver Post