#29 in Crime & mystery
Shutter Island
- 385
- Pages
- about 7 h
- Reading time
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Our view
“Shutter Island” is a tightly built thriller in which every clue has been laid with care for the turn the story finally takes. Set in a cut-off asylum for criminal patients, it moves quickly and keeps its atmosphere grim and precise. Come to it knowing as little as possible; some readers note that the surprise fades if the film has got there first.
The view of the BookRank editors, written from readers’ ratings and comments. It does not affect the score or the book’s place in a ranking.
About the book
Shutter Island is a novel by American writer Dennis Lehane, published by HarperCollins in April 2003. It is about a U.S. Marshal who goes to an isolated hospital for the criminally insane to investigate the disappearance of a patient who is a serial killer. Lehane has said he sought to write a novel that would be an homage to Gothic settings, B movies, and pulp. He described the novel as a hybrid of the works of the Brontë sisters and the 1956 film Invasion of the Body Snatchers. His intent was to write the main characters in a position where they would lack 20th-century resources such as radio communications. He also structured the book to be "more taut" than his previous book, Mystic River.
Where the score comes from
The sources average 8.1 across 393 ratings — not yet many, so the reader vote carries 73% of the weight and the rest pulls toward the Crime & mystery average of 7.6. That is how 8.0 comes out.
| Source | Average | Ratings | Weight |
|---|---|---|---|
| Open Library | 8.1 | 22 | 6% |
| Hardcover | 8.1 | 371 | 94% |
Frequently asked
How long is Shutter Island?
It has 385 pages — shorter than 57% of the ranked books in Crime & mystery.
In this book
Themes this book shares with others — each leads to the best books on it.
If you liked this
Same shelf — Crime & mystery — with scores between 7.9 and 8.0, closest to this book.
