SHUTTER ISLAND

TITLE OF THIS REVIEW: "Anagram Your Way to a Solution." *** If you have watched SHUTTER ISLAND (the 2010 Martin Scorsese movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio) before reading the novel, then you already know every "spoiler" in this "spoiler-rich" book. *** This much reviewed novel by Dennis Lehane is rightly acclaimed. Read it! It is almost impossible to review it, however, without giving away its ending, and that ending should not be spoiled. I will therefore say little. According to the novel's Prologue, the narrative is taken from the May 3, 1993 journal of Dr Lester Sheehan, psychiatrist. It describes four "late summer" days in September 1954, almost 40 years earlier. The narrator, Dr Sheehan, will soon lose his wife to illness. His own health is not great. He forgets a lot. But the story of Shutter Island is one he must set down before it is too late. *** The tale, we are told by Dr Sheehan, is about four people and an island overrun with huge rats. Every day some rats hopelessly try to swim across waters near Boston to freedom on the mainland. They never make it. But Teddy Daniel, the novel's principal character, would cheer their effort. Teddy once had "a poor dead wife, Dolores Chanal." Two other key characters, described as "twin terrors" are Rachel Solando and Andrew Laeddis. *** At novel's beginning two U.S. Marshals, Teddy Daniel and Chuck Aule are arriving by ferry on isolated island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the violent criminally insane. This is a Federal facility. And a patient committed to it by a Federal judge had escaped from her cell the night before. *** I will say no more, other than to suggest that you are about to enter into a world of mindgames, codes and most especially anagrams. Think about anagrams really hard and virtually on every page. And further spoiler spoileth not! Enjoy. -OOO-