This New York Times bestseller is an arresting psychological thriller in which two U. S. Marshals hunting for an escaped mental patient unveil a nightmare world of CIA drug trials, Nazi inspired eugenic work, and repressive mind control. In the year 1954, U. S. Marshal Teddy Daniels and his new partner, Chuck Aule, come to Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane, to investigate an unexplained disappearance. Multiple murderess Rachel Solando is loose somewhere on this barren island, having vanished from a locked, guarded cell in an impossible locked room mystery. As a killer hurricane bears relentlessly down on the island, hints of radical experimentation and covert government machinations add darker, more sinister shades to an already bizarre case. Because in this hospital steeped in gothic atmosphere, nothing at Ashecliffe Hospital is remotely what it seems