Shutter Island

In 1954 two federal marshals are ferried to Shutter Island in Boston Harbour, where Ashecliffe Hospital holds patients who have committed violent crimes and been found insane.

A woman has vanished from a locked room. A storm is coming, the staff are unhelpful, and the senior marshal has private reasons for wanting to be on the island.

A locked room, on an island, with a hurricane due.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Lehane assembles the parts deliberately: the gothic asylum, the isolated setting, the cut communications, the sinister doctor, the unreliable narration and the ticking weather.

The book is openly a construction out of pulp materials, and it uses the reader's familiarity with those materials as part of its method.

The marshal is a widower, a veteran of the liberation of Dachau, a migraine sufferer, and increasingly certain that the hospital is conducting experiments on patients.

His perceptions are the reader's only access, and the novel is careful to make his reasoning look sound while quietly accumulating details that do not fit.

The paranoia is period-specific: HUAC, lobotomy, early psychopharmacology and rumours of government experimentation on human subjects are all live anxieties in 1954.

Lehane uses them to make Teddy's suspicions historically plausible rather than merely paranoid, which is what keeps the middle of the book balanced.

Beneath the conspiracy plot the novel is about grief, guilt and the stories people build to make an unbearable fact survivable.

The Dachau material is not decoration. It establishes early that this is a character who has already seen more than can be integrated, and that his mind has strategies for it.

Short chapters, a four-day timeline and a storm that steadily removes options: the ferry stops, the phones fail, the roads flood. The escalation is mechanical and the book is considerably faster than Lehane's other standalone work.

The middle section, in which the pair are effectively trapped and reduced to interviewing staff who have clearly been briefed, is where the dread is best sustained.

The novel has a well-known reversal, and it is fair — the evidence is present throughout, and a second reading finds it distributed with real skill.

What distinguishes it from a mere trick is that the reversal changes the emotional meaning of everything preceding it rather than merely the facts.

It is one of the few thrillers genuinely improved by knowing the ending, because the dialogue is written to work in two registers at once.

Scenes that read as evasion on a first pass read as patience on a second, which is an unusual amount of craft to spend on a book most people read for the surprise.

Written so that every conversation means one thing forwards and another backwards.

Devmark’s reading — not a quotation from the book

Plainer and more functional than Mystic River, with the lyricism reserved for the island's weather and for Teddy's memories of his wife.

The restraint is strategic. A more decorated style would have drawn attention to the places where the narration is being economical with the truth.

The novel closes on a line of dialogue that reopens the question the resolution appeared to settle, and does not answer it.

It is the book's best decision. The ambiguity is genuine rather than coy: both readings are fully supported by the preceding four hundred pages, and choosing between them requires deciding what you think a person owes themselves. It converts a clever thriller into something considerably sadder.

The 2010 adaptation is faithful in plot and considerably more baroque in style, with an ending that preserves the final ambiguity.

The novel is quieter and gives more room to Teddy's interior life, which makes the resolution land as grief rather than as revelation. Scorsese externalises the same material as hallucination and weather, a legitimate choice that trades the book's claustrophobia for spectacle.

Readers who enjoy being played with by a book that plays fair. It requires nothing and moves very quickly.

Readers who dislike reversals on principle should avoid it, since the whole structure is organised around one and no part of the book is indifferent to it. There is no secondary pleasure to fall back on if the central device does not work for you.