Shutter Island

Shutter Island is a novel by the American writer Dennis Lehane, published in 2003. It was written as an homage to gothic settings and to the cheaper kinds of story-telling the author had grown up on, and he has described it as a hybrid of the Brontës and a nineteen-fifties science fiction film.

Teddy Daniels and his partner Chuck Aule come to the island's hospital to investigate a disappearance. The hospital keeps its patients in a complex of buildings inside a fortress, the weather makes the crossing to the mainland uncertain, and the institution is run by doctors whose methods are not those of any prison the marshal has worked in.

Lehane deliberately took away the tools that would normally settle a question of this kind: there are no reliable communications with the outside, the records do not match what the staff say, and the two marshals have their own reasons for being there that they are slow to explain to each other. The novel is constructed to keep the reader off balance in the same way as the men investigating, and it is as interested in the history of the institution as in the missing woman.