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Federal Marshall Teddy Daniels and his new partner, Chuck Aule, arrive at Shutter Island on the Boston Harbor ferry, one day in the autumn of 1954. They have been sent to search for Rachel Solando, a missing inmate of Ashecliffe Hospital, a forbidding structure that was formally a military installation. The island is further out in the harbor than San Quentin. There's no place she could have gone. She has to be somewhere on Shutter Island. SHUTTER ISLAND a psychological thriller set in a closed universe, a sort of locked room mystery, with good and evil confused and intermingled. There are vivid descriptions of the island during a hurricane, of Teddy's severe migraines, of the island and structures thereupon, of Teddy's first meeting with his wife, Dolores, at the Coconut Grove night club in Boston. Dolores has been afraid of fire ever since the Coconut Grove burned on that November night in 1942 with the loss of 492 lives. She apparently died in a house fire set by an arsonist who is now an inmate of Ashecliffe Hospital. There are references to the hospital being used by the House Unamerican Activities Committee as a place in which to perform illegal brain operations and use untested psychotropic drugs on inmates. There are also implications of the use of hallucinatory agents. Is anything what it seems? Are Teddy and Chuck really federal agents? I think you'll have to read or listen to this book yourself and make up your mind, if you can. An interview with the author has taken some of the confusion out of this book. He says "If there is a Gothic cliche I missed, I'd like to know what it is...I was having a good time. I would ask myself, 'What would the Bronte sisters do'?" (Boston GLOBE June 1, 2003) If one approaches the book from that point of view, then all becomes clear. Don't try and analyze. Just go along for the ride Tom Stechschulte, the reader of this audio version makes each of the characters distinctive and his narration of the hurricane scene is especially chilling. Wolfgang Peterson, the German director of DAS BOOT and THE PERFECT STORM, has purportedly optioned SHUTTER ISLAND. He would be perfect, as Lehane admits in the interview cited above.
Reviewed by Barbara Franchi, May 2003
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