US Marshal Teddy Daniels has come to Shutter Island, home of Ashecliffe Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Along with his partner, Chuck Aule, he sets out to find an escaped murderess named Rachel Solando as a hurricane bears down upon them. But nothing at Ashecliffe Hospital is what it seems, and neither is Teddy Daniels.

Dying billionaire, Trevor Stone hires private detectives, Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro to find his missing daughter. Grief-stricken over the death of her mother and the impending death of her father, Desiree Stone has been missing for three weeks. So has the first investigator, Trevor Stone hired to find her: Jay Becker, Patrick's mentor.

Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro are tough private investigators who know the blue-collar neighbourhoods and ghettos of Boston's Dorchester section as only natives can. Working out of an old church belfry, Kenzie and Gennaro take on a seemingly simple assignment for a prominent politician: to uncover the whereabouts of Jenna Angeline.

When wisecracking detectives, Patrick Kenzie and Angie Gennaro agree to protect the son of a prominent psychiatrist who believes she may have angered the Boston Irish Mafia, they soon find bodies are piling up around them - seemingly unconnected with their case. And what's more all the clues point to an unlikely suspect!

As the Indian summer fades, Amanda McCready stays gone - banished so completely that she seems never to have existed. And when a second child disappears, Kenzie and Gennaro face a local media more interested in sensationalizing the abductions than helping to solve them, and a faceless power determined to obstruct their efforts.

Boston private investigators, Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro's relationship has hit the skids - their long-standing professional commitment and growing romance have disintegrated due to seemingly irreparable personal differences. But despite these problems, this book brings them together again to close down a predator.