Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane.
Title: Shutter Island.
Author: Dennis Lehane.
Genre: Fiction, mystery, horror, crime.
Country: U.S.
Language: English.
Publication Date: April 15, 2003.
Summary: The year is 1954. U.S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his new partner, Chuck Aule, have come to Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, to investigate the disappearance of a patient. Multiple murderess Rachel Solando is loose somewhere on this remote and barren island, despite having been kept in a locked cell under constant surveillance. As a killer hurricane relentlessly bears down on them, a strange case takes on even darker, more sinister shades, with hints of radical experimentation, horrifying surgeries, and lethal counter-moves made in the cause of a covert shadow war. No one is going to escape Shutter Island unscathed, because nothing at Ashecliffe Hospital is what it seems. But then neither is Teddy Daniels.
My rating: 7.5/10.
♥ Teddy said, "At Dachau, the SS guards surrendered to us. Five hundred of them. Now there were reporters there, but they'd seen all the bodies piled up at the train station too. They could smell exactly what we were smelling. They looked at us and they wanted us to do what we did. And we sure as hell wanted to do it. So we executed every one of those fucking Krauts. Disarmed them, leaned them against walls, executed them. Machine-gunned over three hundred men at one time. Walked down the line putting bullets into the head of anyone still breathing. A war crime if ever there was one. Right? But, Chuck, that was the least we could have done. Fucking reporters were clapping. The camp prisoners were so happy they were weeping. So we handed a few of the storm troopers over to them. And they tore them to shreds. By the end of that day, we'd removed five hundred souls from the face of the earth. Murdered 'em all. No self-defense, no warfare came into it. It was homicide. And yet, there was no gray area. They deserved so much worse. So, fine - but how do you live with that? How do you tell the wife and the parents and the kids that you've done this thing? You've executed unarmed people? You've killed boys? Boys with guns and uniforms, but boys just the same? Answer is - You can't tell 'em. They'll never understand. Because what you did was for the right reason. But what you did was also wrong. And you'll never wash it off."
♥ "She's dead. Let her go."
He pressed his smiling, weeping face between the bars and held Teddy with his soft swollen eyes.
Teddy felt her in him, pressed at the base of his throat. He could see her sitting in the early July haze, in that dark orange light a city gets on summer nights just after sundown, looking up as he pulled to the curb and the kids returned to their skickball game in the middle of the street, and the laundry flapped overhead, and she watched him approach with her chin propped on the heel of her hand and the cigarette held up by her ear, and he'd brought flowers for once, and she was so simply his love, his girl, watching him approach as if she were memorizing him and his walk and those flowers and this moment, and he wanted to ask her what sound a heart made when it broke from pleasure, when just the sight of someone filled you the way food, blood, and air never could, when you felt as if you'd been born for only one moment, and this, for whatever reason, was it.
Let her go, Noyce had said.
♥ Christ, how Teddy envied Chuck. His ability to believe in the words he spoke. In silly flirtations. In his easy-GI's penchant for quick, meaningless word-play. But most of all for the weightlessness of his charm.
Charm had never come easily to Teddy. After the war, it had come harder still. After Dolores, not at all.
Charm was the luxury of those who still believed in the essential rightness of things. In purity and picket fences.
♥ Teddy sat down on a boulder and felt the sweat saturating his body, soaking his white shirt and pants, and he felt exhilarated. His heart still thumped, and his eyes itched, and the back of his shoulders and neck tingled, and he knew this was, outside of love, the greatest feeling in the world.
To have escaped.
♥ He slipped back under the water and continued clawing, unable to risk the splashing that freestyle or even doggie-paddling would cause, and after a while, he came to the bend in the shoreline and made his way around it and walked up onto the sand and sat in the sun and shook from the cold. He walked as much of the shore as he could before he ran into a set of outcroppings that pushed him back into the water and he tied his shoes together and hung them around his neck and went for another swim and envisioned his father's bones somewhere on this same ocean floor and envisioned sharks and their fins and their great snapping tails and barracuda with rows of white teeth and he knew he was getting through this because he had to and the water had numbed him and he had no choice now but to do this and he might have to do it again in a couple of days when the Betsy Ross dropped its booty off the island's southern tip, and he knew that the only way to conquer fear was to face it, he'd learned that in the war enough, but even so, if he could manage it, he would never, ever, get in the ocean again. He could feel it watching him and touching him. He could feel the age of it, more ancient than gods and prouder of its body count.