Book 03 - Shutter Island - Dennis Lehane

Another week, another book finished on time.  I seem to be making a habit of this.  No preamble today, just straight to the review.

Book 03 - Shutter Island - Dennis Lehane

Rachel Solano is missing.  She has disappeared from a locked room in a locked building in a high security Federal facility for the criminally insane, on a island off the coast of Massachusetts.  In order to escape, she would have had to get through multiple locked doors, past multiple guards, and then somehow make it off the island and cross an icy expanse of water to make it to the mainland.  It's like she evaporated into thin air.

It is the mid-1950s and Teddy Daniels is a U.S. Federal Marshal sent to help recover the missing inmate.  Teddy, a highly decorated soldier in World War II, has not been the same since his wife died in a fire a few years back.  He drinks too much, and clings too hard to the memory of his late wife.  She invades his dreams, and he frequently converses with her in his mind.

Together with his new partner Chuck, they venture to the island, and are met with lies and stonewalling.  They are unable to interview the woman's primary psychiatrist, as he has been allowed to leave the island on a planned vacation.  There is a bit too much alignment in the stories told by the staff of the facility, like they have been coached as to what to say.  To add to the mystery, a strange coded message has seemingly been left behind by Rachel.

Ted and Chuck explore the island looking for clues to explain what is going on.  After a brush with the beginnings of an impending hurricane that is bearing down on the island, they return to discover that Rachel has miraculously been found, although there is still no good explanation as to how she came to be missing in the first place.

Ted's encounter with Rachel precipitates a brutal migraine attack, and after that things continue to go poorly for Teddy.  His already tenuous grip on reality is starting to slip.  When he does sleep, he is plagued by intensely nightmarish dreams.  Several encounters he has with people on the island start to feed the seeds of paranoia, and Ted starts to wonder who he can trust.  He continues on though, not so much because he wants to solve the mystery of Rachel, but for an ulterior motive that brought him to the island in the first place.  Learning the truth about this motivation threatens to undo the remaining portion of his sanity.  But is he really going crazy, or is this part of a plot by the doctors to protect the highly experimental and morally questionable work that seems to be going on in the lighthouse and the mysterious Ward C?  And just who *is* Patient 67?

I was a bit disappointed when I started reading this, as it wasn't anywhere near the scary psychological thriller I'd hoped it would be.  Even when the action picks up, it still let me down a bit.  The prose is a bit mainstream and didn't hold me in suspense like I would have hoped.  I'm not saying it was a bad read.  It's a decent pop mystery novel that's perfect for summertime beach reading.

But it's cold outside, and I'm stuck inside,  and I'm looking for a little more.