I picked up this older book at Audible a week or so ago because:  1.  it was on sale and 2.     I enjoyed one of Lehane’s books in the past (the other one wasn’t so hot).   The premise  of this story was intriguing and the narrator sounded good (I’ve heard him before), so I gave it a try.

I got really involved from the start when Doctor Sheehan returns to the east coast island (in Boston Harbor) where there is a rather gothic styled high security mental hospital for the criminally insane and where a patient went missing 20 years prior  (prior to 1993 when the letter was written – the book was published in 2003).

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Shutter Island
by Dennis Lehane
2003 / 400 pages
read by Tom Stechschulte / 9h 38m
rating:  B  / crime
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Teddy Daniels is a  Federal Marshall and has been assigned to Shutter Island together with his new partner Chuck Aule to investigate the disappearance of patient/inmate Rachel Solano who is there for killing her three children.

There is realistically no way she could have escaped.  Even the rats,  and there is an abundance of rats,  can’t escape.

Teddy has problems too –   memories of his wife after his return from Korea.  She was killed in a fire when their apartment house  was burned   The arsonist was convicted and sentenced to … you guessed it …  Shutter Island.

To add to the tension,  a hurricane tears through the place and although Teddy and Chuck plan to leave on the next ferry,  it’s suddenly not possible.  Meanwhile the two really have to leave,  – there are seriously dangerous things going on.

Taking place in a mental hospital,  the story gets realistically strange what with hallucinations and all.   Also,  there’s a lot of sexual content thanks to the revisiting old memories of better days.  But on the plus side it’s a page-turner –  there’s a huge amount of suspense driving this novel and the ending was a surprise.

Bottom line,  it was pretty good,  but off in some way with all the shenanigans.