SPOILER ON SHUTTER ISLAND!!!!
I find the whole premise of the book "cheating" since there's
no way any prison hospital would give a dangerous inmate free
reign, and create the scenario that was given, and I did find
other smaller cheating, such as his convenient psychotic
episodes imagining a woman inmate, and there were others.
That said, none of this cheating and utter preposterousness
of the story would've bothered me if this were a Stephen King
book. Maybe even that innanely hokey rules of nine, or
whatever that code was, wouldn't have bothered me
(nah, I still owuld've found it too precious and it still
would've bugged the hell out of me). That was kind of my
point in that its all readers expectation--if I was expecting
a horror novel, I probably would've enjoyed Shutter Island.
Expecting a crime or noir novel, I was disappointed and felt
cheated. All that being said--I did find this Lehane's best
novel, and it's not Lehane's fault how the book was marketed,
reviewed (as a crime novel--at least by the reviews I read),
or the expectations I ended up having. And in a way, I'm
guilty of the same--I intentionally set up Fast Lane for the
reader to think it's a PI novel, which it isn't by any means,
and I'm sure some readers were equally annoyed once they
figured what the book really was.
--Dave Z.
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