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US Marshal Teddy Daniels has come to Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, to find an escaped murderer named Rachel Solando.

As a killer hurricane bears down on the island, the investigation deepens and the questions mount. How has a barefoot woman... read more

Summary edit see section history

It is the summer of July 1954

U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels has come to Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Along with his partner, Chuck Aule, he sets out to find a patient that has escaped, a Rachel Salondo, who is accused of killing her children. ... read more (warning: may contain spoilers)

It is the summer of July 1954

U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels has come to Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Along with his partner, Chuck Aule, he sets out to find a patient that has escaped, a Rachel Salondo, who is accused of killing her children.

But nothing at Ashecliffe Hospital is what it seems.

And neither is Teddy Daniels.

Is he there to find a missing patient? Or has he been sent to look into rumors of Ashecliffe’s radical approach to psychiatry? An approach that may include drug experimentation, and hideous surgical trials.

Or is there another, more personal reason why he has come there?

As the investigation deepens, the questions only mount:
How has a barefoot woman escaped the island from a locked room?
Who is leaving clues in the form of cryptic codes?
Why is there no record of a patient committed there just one year before?
What really goes on in Ward C?
Why is an empty lighthouse surrounded by an electrified fence and armed guards?
The closer Teddy and Chuck get to the truth, the more elusive it becomes, and the more they begin to believe that they may never leave Shutter Island. Because someone is trying to drive them insane. . . .

Characters/People edit see section history

  • Teddy Daniels: Teddy Daniels is a federally appointed U.S. Marshall and World War 2 Veteran who is sent to Shutter Island to investigate the case of a missing patient
  • Chuck Aule: Teddy Daniels' new partner, recently transferred from the Seattle US Marshal's office.
  • Dr. John Cawley: Chief of Staff and psychiatrist for Ashecliffe Hospital
  • Dolores Daniels: Teddy Daniel's wife who died in a fire in their apartment building.
  • Trey Washington: Orderly and Teddy and Chuck's roommate while at Ashecliffe
  • Dr. Jeremiah Naehring: Psychiatrist at Ashecliffe
  • Ike Ganton: 3rd floor orderly on duty the night that Rachel Solando disappeared
  • Rachel Solando: Patient at Ashecliffe Hospital, who has escaped, prompting the search by the US Marshals
  • George Noyce: Former patient at Ashecliffe Hospital whom Daniels questioned about Andrew Laeddis
  • Andrew Laeddis: The person who Teddy believes killed his wife who is currently a patient at Ashecliffe Hospital
  • Dr. Lester Sheehan: Psychiatrist at Ashecliffe Hospital who treated Rachael Solando and has left Shutter Island before the hurricane
  • McPherson: Deputy Warden of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane
  • Kerry Marino: Psychiatric nurse described as a "slim woman with a bundle of red hair."
Show all 13 characters
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Quotes edit see section history

  • “"The price of progress." He placed one foot on the towline and leaned against the rail beside Teddy, and they watched the island attempt to define itself. "With the leaps-and there are leaps going on, don't kid yourself, leaps every day-happening in the field of mental health, a place like this will cease to exist. Barbaric they'll call it in twenty years from now. An unfortunate by-product of the bygone Victorian influence. And go it should, they'll say. Incorporation will be the order of the day. You are all welcomed into the fold. We will soothe you. Rebuild you. We are all General Marshalls. We are a new society, and there is no place for exclusion. No Elbas.”
    Chuck Aule
  • “How much violence, Marshal, do you think a man can carry before it breaks him?”
    Dr. Cawley
  • “Cawley didn't look startled. He didn't look scared. He tapped his cigarrette against the side of the ashtray in front of him and said to Teddy:'Why you all wet, baby?'”
  • “Valuable things also have a way of being misunderstood in their own time. Everyone wants a quick fix. We’re tired of being afraid, tired of being sad, tired of feeling overwhelmed, tired of feeling tired. We want the old days back, and we don’t even remember them, and we want to push into the future, paradoxically, at top speed. Patience and forbearance become the first casualties of progress.”
    Dr. Cawley
  • “God gives us earthquakes, hurricanes, tornadoes. He gives us mountains that spew fire onto our heads. Oceans that swallow ships. He gives us nature, and nature is a smiling killer. He gives us disease so that in our death we believe He gave us orifices only so that we could feel our life bleed out of them. He gave us lust and fury and greed and our filthy hearts. So that we could wage violence in His honour. There is no moral order as pure as this storm we’ve just seen. There is no moral order at all. There is only this - can my violence conquer yours?”
    Warden
  • “A hydrogen bomb, it implodes. It falls on itself and goes through a series of internal breakdowns, collapsing and collapsing. But all that collapsing? It creates mass and density. See, the fury of its own self-destruction creates an entirely new monster. You get it? Do you? The bigger the breakdown, then the bigger the destruction of self, then the more potent it becomes. And then, okay, okay? Fucking blammo! Just… bang, boom, whoosh. In its absence of self, it spreads. Creates and explosion off of its implosion that is a hundred times, a thousand times, a million times more devastating than any bomb in history. That’s our legacy. And don’t you forget it.”
  • “'If you believe, gentlemen, that you are the sole holder of truth, then everyone else must be lying. And if everyone is lying...''Then any truth they say, must be a lie'.”
    Dr. Cawley and Chuck
  • “'You're big. Mean-looking crew cut. You can handle yourself. Your knuckles are scarred. My father was like that. He didn't have the scars. His hands were smooth. But he was mean-looking. My brothers too. They used to beat me up.' 'I'm not going to beat you up,' Teddy said.'But you could. Don't you see? You have that power. And I don't. And that makes me vulnerable. Being vulnerable makes me scared.'”
    Peter
  • “'The mind,' He said. 'Mine, yours, anyone's. It's an engine essentially. That's what it is. A very delicate, intricate motor. And it's got all these pieces, all these gears and bolts and hinges. And we don't even know what half of them do. But if just one gear slips, just one... Have you thought about that?'”
    Peter
  • “'Men are foolish. They eat and drink and pass gas and fornicate and procreate, and this last is particularly unfortunate, because the world would be a much better place with far fewer of us in it.'”
    Warden
  • “'Yeah, I was. Saw the world.''What'd you think of it?''Different languages, same shit.'”
    Teddy and Trey
  • Popular Highlights from Kindle Customers
  • THE LAW OF 4 I AM 47 THEY WERE 80 +YOU ARE 3 WE ARE 4 BUT WHO IS 67?
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  • it—waking, after all, was an almost natal state. You surfaced without a history, then spent the blinks and yawns reassembling your past, shuffling the shards into chronological order before fortifying yourself for the present.
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  • Charm was the luxury of those who still believed in the essential rightness of things. In purity and picket fences.
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  • obfuscate. Confuse the listener until they believe out of exhaustion more than any sense of truth.
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  • time is nothing to me but a series of bookmarks that I use to jump back and forth through the text of my life, returning again and again to the events that mark me, in the eyes of my more astute colleagues, as bearing all the characteristics of the classic melancholic.
    Highlighted by 110 Kindle customers
  • 2 Deputy Warden McPherson met them at the dock. He was… 3 Dr. Cawley was thin to the point of
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  • utile? They’re exceptionally utile creatures.”
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  • desultory, as if no one but he and Chuck truly had his heart in it. The men wound their way along the inner ring above the shoreline with downcast eyes and sullen steps.
    Highlighted by 35 Kindle customers
  • mansarded Victorian housed the warden and a dark, beautiful Tudor minicastle, which had once housed the Union commander of the northeastern shoreline, served as the quarters of our chief of staff. Inside the wall were the staff quarters—quaint, clapboard cottages for the clinicians, three low-slung cinder
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  • erudition than usual.” Teddy said, “What can I tell you? I did some homework. Chuck, what do you think would happen if you gave hallucinogens to people with extreme schizophrenia?” “No one would do that.” “They do it, and it’s legal.
    Highlighted by 20 Kindle customers
Show all 21 quotes from this book

Setting & Locations edit see section history

Organizations edit see section history

  • The O.S.S.: The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was a United States intelligence agency formed during World War II. It was the wartime intelligence agency, and it was the predecessor of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). This agency was formed in order to coordinate espionage activities behind enemy lines for the branches of the United States military.

First Sentence edit see section history

I haven't laid eyes on the island in several years.

Table of Contents edit see section history

1. Day One- Rachel
2. Day Two- Patient Sixty-Seven
3. Day Three- Laeddis
4. Day Four- Bad Sailor

Series & Lists edit see section history

This is book 38 of 99 in NPR's Top 100 Killer Thriller. (community list)
This book is in Books Filmed By Martin Scorsese. (community list)

Authors & Contributors edit see section history

  1. Dennis Lehane (Author)

First Edition edit see section history

Original Language: English
Publisher: William Morrow
Country: USA
Publication Date: 15 April 2003
ISBN: 0688163173
Page Count: 336

Awards edit see section history

Classification edit see section history

  • Library of Congress: PS3562.E426
  • Dewey: 741.5944

Movie Connections edit see section history

More Books Like This edit see section history

   
  • Mystic River
  • Darkness, Take My Hand

Books with Additional Background Information edit see section history

   
  • Mad in America
  • Gracefully Insane
  • The Boston Harbor Islands: A History of an Urban Wilderness

Books Influenced by This Book edit see section history

   
  • Shutter Island Graphic Novel

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