When a beautiful-and certifiably crazy-patient escapes, U.S. ( Audio version.) 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. It has the headlong suspense and whopper of a story you would expect in any well-made thriller. You're sure to talk about this one over lunch. It's a great, fun read, and then there's that ending. The suspense is molasses-thick with a plot that will keep you guessing. Shutter Island is a tremendously satisfying thriller. 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. 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. To read Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island is to enter a nightmare of madness, violence and deception. 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. But whichever genre he's aiming for in this misguided effort-psychological suspense, cold war thriller or Grand Guignol melodrama-he misses it by a nautical mile. Dennis Lehane takes a leap into unknown genre territory in Shutter Island.

Shutter island book