Dennis Lehane will see a third of his novels come to the big screen:

Variety has reported that Academy award-winner Martin Scorsese will team up with Leonardo DiCaprio to make a film version of Lehane’s Shutter Island. It will be their fourth time working together.

“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 bears relentlessly down on them, a strange case takes on even darker, more sinister shades — with hints of radical experimentation, horrifying surgeries, and lethal countermoves 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.”

The screenplay was written by Laeta Kalogridis. Kalogridis previous wrote Alexander and Pathfinder, and is currently a executive producer on the Bionic Woman as well as having written James Cameron’s forthcoming Battle Angel.

Those credits don’t exactly fill me with confidence. Shutter Island is a fairly complex book that is going to require some skillful writing to make it translate to the big screen. Unless I missed something, Alexander was not exactly overflowing with brilliance.

If you have not read Shutter Island (or any other Lehane book for that matter), pick up a copy. Dennis is one of the finest crime writers alive today and should be read by every person with a brain.