Rating: 
Summary: (4.5) Face to face with pure evil?
Review: Shutter Island is the kind of scary that creeps up, slowly, taking its time, compounding the menace. Marshall Teddy Daniels and his new partner Chuck Aule come to Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane in 1954 to find an escaped murderess, Rachel Solando.There are varying levels of patients at the hospital, the worst of them in Ward C. While conducting their search, unaided by top hospital personnel, Teddy mentions the loss of his wife, who died in a fire two years earlier. The arsonist responsible for that fire is currently held somewhere in the facilities, possibly in Ward C. Chuck expresses his concern that Teddy hasn't told him everything about this visit, his possible desire to seek out and confront the arsonist, Andrew Laeddis. Add to the mix a hurricane bearing down upon the island and no outside communications and the stage is set. Then a patient slips Teddy a note that says, "run"... All this is merely window dressing, the bare bones plot. The truth of this terrifying novel is purely psychological and devastating. For this reader, visions of Jacob's Ladder and Carrion Comfort loom, novels equally as frightening in this particular, and exclusive, genre. Lehane is the master and the characters are his puppets, beautifully manipulated through the halls of an institution where mental patients run amok, friends become foes and nothing is what it seems. In a heady mix of possibilities, hallucinogens, Nazi surgical experiments, torture, death and the ready tricks of a damaged mind, Lehane navigates through a mélange of terror that uncovers the most basic of human fears. Teddy Daniels comes face to face with his own demons, realizing too late that he ignored the warnings all along the way. Quickly infected with Teddy's paranoia, the reader is helpless as the intrepid Marshall forges ahead, unstoppable. This is not a story for the faint of heart, but Shutter Island is unquestionably a must read. Just don't make the mistake of thinking you've figured it out...Luan Gaines/2003.
Rating: 
Summary: Lehane got the psychology right
Review: My daughter just visited for Christmas, bringing with her a copy of Dennis Lehane's Shutter Island she had gotten from the library. She suggested that I read it, as she had liked it and thought I would. Boy, did I. As a biological psychologist and a historian of psychology, I consider myself knowledgeable about the development of psychosurgery by Egas Moniz in the late 30s and the pharmacological revolution in the mid1950s. This came about with the discovery of chlorpromazine (Thorazine), the first of the so-called major tranquilizers, actually the first of the antipsychotics. At any rate, I found the medical issues completely plausible and loved Lehane's writing from the first page. Teddy was completely convincing to me, and I was totally sucked into his world. The ending, which I won't divulge, shouldn't have been as much of a surprise as it was, as Lehane had certainly foreshadowed it at several places in the book. Bottom line: Loved it. I disagree absolutely and totally with the reviewer who found it unconvincing and worthy of just 1 star.
Rating:
Summary: WoW! Stunning book!
Review: As a big time reader of mysteries, I consider myself hard to please. This book did it! Outstanding characterization, easy to read, and fast paced, this would have to go on my top 10 list for 2003. What a great ending! Looking forward to more from this young author!
Rating: 
Summary: Improbable, unbelievable, unconvincing...and shallow....
Review: It is totally improbable that a staged event such as this, or any, would be allowed in a mental institution housing the USAs most violent criminals and then allowed to continue after 10 men were injured by the target! Get real.
Who's insuring all these employees against injury and death. How'd they get all the employees to play along, and act convincingly? Did they have rehearsals? :o) I liked one sentence. It described the string music playing in the background of a WWII german concentration camps'
commandant's office as "crawling around the walls like a spider. I could hear (given the state of audio in '45) and visualize the
creepiness of that room with the commandant setting there in his chair when Teddy broke in during the liberation of the camp.
Rating:
Summary: So, who is really criminally insane here?
Review: Lehane will take you on a magical mistery tour this time. Enjoy the trip while you can because this will lead to a "bad trip" for sure! While Teddy gets to the Shutter Island, you start to think that there is a big brother watching him everywhere (is there? is he ever getting paranoind?). As Teddy's truth is the only truth you have all over the book (until THAT twisting final), you start to ask yourself who is really the criminally insane after all (The "patients"? The staff? The marshalls themselves? Are you getting insane with them? Or Lehane - Well, after reading the book the sensation is that Lehane deserves a Pulitzer, and then, be sent immediately to Asheciliffe as DANNIEL SHEEN...). And going back to the 50's, start thinking about your average prozac as "radical aproaches", and lobotomies, as usual procedures... This is an Orwell's 1984 with the difference you can't tell if big brother exists outiside the nutters heads (and your own, even after turning over the last page - so, does that make you a nutter?). Is it about deception or redemption? Or both? Who's the bad guy here (is there really one)? This book will leave you with more questions after reading it then before. Not questions about the story,no, no. The type of questioning you do after going trough a nervous breakdown and surviving it. The type of questioning Teddy would do to himself. And that's what make this book HUGE. As said all over the book: "You can leave Shutter Island, but Shutter Island will never leave you"
Rating:
Summary: A great read!
Review: A great read! I truly enjoyed reading this It's a rarity these days to find an author capable of such good storytelling. The story is well written and very engaging, and despite the fact that it lost some momentum in the middle, I found myself eagerly turning pages to find out what would happen next. All in all, though this is not quite a perfect novel, it comes close.
Rating:
Summary: Really Great !
Review: I really enjoyed this book. I wont give you the plot because a lot of other people have already done so. Simply put its a great book about reality and fantasy. How all of us use fantasy to hide our inner-pain and also our true selves. The characters, the dialogue, the plot,the end. All top-notch. In my opinion its not as good as "Mystic River" but I think its because it really fit my taste in books. But this is also another great novel and I cant wait for his next book. On a final note I did feel thislike "Mystic River" transcended genres and becomes a piece of literature.
Rating:
Summary: The last 50 pages will win you over
Review: U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his new partner Chuck Aule have taken the ferry from Boston to Shutter Island, the site of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, a maximum security institution. Daniels has been called in to help locate an escaped patient, a certain Rachel Solando, who found herself in Ashecliffe after murdering her three children. How Rachel escaped is a mystery, though the fact that she managed to break out of a locked room and get past several manned checkpoints and a gaggle of poker-playing orderlies suggests that she had a lot of help. The fact of Rachel's escape is not the only strange thing about Teddy's new assignment. Rachel's doctor is also missing, having left for his vacation immediately after her escape. That he was allowed to leave is a serious breach of standard operating procedure in a lockdown, yet Ashecliffe's deputy warden and the hospital's Chief of Staff seem unconcerned. There is, too, the mystery of what really goes on at the hospital. Rumor has it that the doctors engage in horrific experimental surgeries, ice pick lobotomies on patients who are not anesthetized. Certainly it is suspicious that the old lighthouse, now allegedly functioning as a sewage treatment plant, is under heavy guard and is wrapped in electrified fencing. Reading Shutter Island, my review of the book writing itself in my head, I was going to say that the story is pretty good, if perhaps unbelievable in parts--the marshal's' mounting paranoia and this forbidding facility where creepy things happen, an island they can't leave until a ferry, delayed by a hurricane, returns for them. The book would, I thought, make a decent movie, perhaps a better movie than it is a book because--and this was my chief complaint--the dialogue between Teddy and Chuck is so terribly clunky. "They do it, and it's legal. Only humans get schizophrenia. It doesn't happen to rats or rabbits or cows. So how are you going to test cures for it?" "On humans." "Give that man a cigar." "A cigar that's just a cigar, though, right?" [groan] Teddy said, "If you like." There are, in addition, some unbelievable dream sequences that annoyed me. Nobody talks--or nobody should talk--like Teddy and Chuck do, and nobody has dreams as vivid as Teddy has. But.... But then I read the last fifty pages of the book--which went very fast indeed--and I forgave Lehane the dreams and the clunky dialogue because, I now think, they make sense given the plot. It's a good book. And I still think it would make a good movie.
Rating:
Summary: Another disappointed Lehane fan
Review: Having loved Lehane's previous books, I was really looking forward to this one. What a disappointment! Whereas his Kenzie/Gennaro series pushed the boundaries of its genre, and Mystic River transcended it altogether, Shutter Island reads like a first draft. The situation is contrived, the characters are one-dimensional, the dialogue is replete with cliches, and the writing is just plain clunky. I wanted to abandon the book long before the "surprise" ending, but having taken it on a plane with me I was stuck with it all the way to the bitter end. Don't make my mistake!
Rating: 
Summary: Tedious and predictable as well as being totally unrealistic
Review: A very fast read about a cop dealing with is own personal tragedies who finds himself on an island as Hurricane Carol storms into Boston in 1954. As if a hurricane and his own widowhood weren't enough the island in question contains nothing but a mental hospital for the criminally insane. The hero, Teddy, quickly grows ill-at-ease with the condescending attitude displayed by the staff of the hospital. Some of the patients assert that they are innocent victims being held against their will. On top of that Teddy's own partner seems to know more of what is going on than he is willing to share. Some have said that this was a shocking book with a surprise ending but I could see where it was heading fairly quickly. I thought that there were a lot of contrivances and of course the big surprise was a bit of a let down. It was a good pot-boiler type of mystery and I read through it quickly enough that I can't say it was a waste of time. "Shutter Island" is a good beach read but will never make it into the annals of great literature.
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