Shutter Island

Shutter Island is a novel by American writer Dennis Lehane, published by HarperCollins in April 2003. It is about a U.S. Marshal who goes to an isolated hospital for the criminally insane to investigate the disappearance of a patient who is a multiple murderer. Lehane has said he sought to write a novel that would be an homage to Gothic settings, B movies, and pulp. He described the novel as a hybrid of the works of the Brontë sisters and the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. His intent was to write the main characters in a position where they would lack 20th-century resources such as radio communications. He also structured the book to be "more taut" than his previous book, Mystic River.

Lehane was inspired by the hospital and grounds on Long Island in Boston Harbor for the model of the hospital and island. Lehane had visited it in the Blizzard of 1978 as a child with his uncle and family.

A film adaptation of the novel, adapted by Laeta Kalogridis and directed by Martin Scorsese, was released on February 19, 2010.

Plot

In 1954, widowed U.S. Marshal Edward "Teddy" Daniels and his new partner, Chuck Aule, go on a ferry boat to Shutter Island, the home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the criminally insane, to investigate the disappearance of a patient, Rachel Solando (who was incarcerated for drowning her three children). Despite being kept in a cell under constant supervision, she has escaped the hospital and the desolate island.