Product Description

You remember Hannibal Lecter: gentleman, genius, cannibal. Seven years have passed since Dr. Lecter escaped from custody. And for seven years he's been at large, free to savor the scents, the essences, of an unguarded world.

But intruders have entered Dr. Lecter's world, piercing his new identity, sensing the evil that surrounds him. For the multimillionaire Hannibal left maimed, for a corrupt Italian policeman, and for FBI agent Clarice Starling, who once stood before Lecter and who has never been the same, the final hunt for Hannibal Lecter has begun. All of them, in their separate ways, want to find Dr. Lecter. And all three will get their wish. But only one will live long enough to savor the reward....

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #533146 in Books
• Published on: 2000-05
• Released on: 2000-05-23
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• 560 pages

Amazon.com Review
Horror lit's head chef Harris serves up another course in his Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter trilogy, and it's a pièce de résistance for those with strong stomachs. In the first book, Red Dragon (filmed as Manhunter), Hannibal diabolically helps the FBI track a fascinating serial killer. (Takes one to know one.) In The Silence of the Lambs, he advises fledgling FBI manhunter Clarice Starling, then makes a bloody, brilliant escape.

Years later, posing as scholarly Dr. Fell, curator of a grand family's palazzo, Hannibal lives the good life in Florence, playing lovely tunes by serial killer/composer Henry VIII and killing hardly anyone himself. Clarice is unluckier: in the novel's action-film-like opening scene, she survives an FBI shootout gone wrong, and her nemesis, Paul Krendler, makes her the fall guy. Clarice is suspended, so, unfortunately, the first cop who stumbles on Hannibal is an Italian named Pazzi, who takes after his ancestors, greedy betrayers depicted in Dante's Inferno.

Pazzi is on the take from a character as scary as Hannibal: Mason Verger. When Verger was a young man busted for raping children, his vast wealth saved him from jail. All he needed was psychotherapy--with Dr. Lecter. Thanks to the treatment, Verger is now on a respirator, paralyzed except for one crablike hand, watching his enormous, brutal moray eel swim figure eights and devour fish. His obsession is to feed Lecter to some other brutal pets.

What happens when the Italian cop gets alone with Hannibal? How does Clarice's reunion with Lecter go from macabre to worse? Suffice it to say that the plot is Harris's weirdest, but it still has his signature mastery of realistic detail. There are flaws: Hannibal's madness gets a motive, which is creepy but lessens his mystery. If you want an exact duplicate of The Silence of the Lambs's Clarice/Hannibal duel, you'll miss what's cool about this book--that Hannibal is actually upstaged at points by other monsters. And if you think it's all unprecedentedly horrible, you're right. But note that the horrors are described with exquisite taste. Harris's secret recipe for success is restraint. --Tim Appelo

From Publishers Weekly
This narrative roils along a herky-jerky vector but remains always mesmerizing, as Harris's prose and insights, particularly his reveries about Hannibal, boast power and an overripe beauty. If at times the suspense slackens and the story slips into silliness, it becomes clear that this is a post-suspense novel, as much sardonic philosophical jest as grand-guignol thriller. Hannibal, we learnA"we" because Harris seduces reader complicity with third-person-plural narrationAis not as we presumed. The monster's aim is not chaos, but order. Through his devotion to manners and the connoisseur's life, in fact to form itself, he hopesAconsciouslyAto reverse entropy and thus the flow of time, to allow a dead sister to live again. He is not Dionysius but Apollo, and it is the barbarians who oppose him who are to be despised. Hannibal may be mad, but in this brilliant, bizarre, absurd novelAas in the public eyeAhe is also hero; and so, at novel's end, in blackest humor, Harris bestows upon him a hero's rewards, outrageously, mockingly. Agent, Morton Janklow. 1.3 million first printing; film rights to Dino De Laurentis. (June)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Eleven years after thrilling readers with his classic suspense novel, Silence of the Lambs, Harris returns with a vengeance in this, the third and presumably final novel in the trilogy (the first was Red Dragon) featuring monstrous serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter. At the tale's outset, FBI agent Clarise Starling, young and ambitious in Silence, is slated to take the fall for a botched arrest. Yet when a manipulative millionaire revives the FBI's interest in the still-at-large Lecter, Starling is reunited with her mentor, Jack Crawford, and sets to work on tracking the good doctor. Although Harris's occasional lapses into baroque language and the novel's confusing, dreamy ending mar an otherwise perfect thriller, enormous patron demand makes this a necessary purchase in even the smallest public library.AMark Annichiarico, formerly with "Library Journal"
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Customer Reviews

In my top Ten Favorite Books List
There is something so sinister and unfamiliar to most people with Hannibal Lector - you love him or you hate and fear him. I don't see any gray area there. It's the truly elegant, noblisse oblige gestures and actions on Hannibal's part that lured me in with Silence. I wanted to know who Hannibal really is - out in the open, away from prison and free to make a life of his choosing knowing it may be the last chance he has to live in the world. The descriptions of Florence are exquisite and moving - having been there myself more than once, I thank Mr. Harris for paying homage to this great city and I found no more fitting place to re-enter Hannibal Lector's life. I won't comment on the emotional, sociological, or ethical issues behind some of the characters' choices in this book other than to say in many ways the ending fit very well indeed. Clarice was looking for mate, a partner that knew her, understood her in ways she could not do for herself. While it's dark and scary and based on inherently evil acts I felt the love between Hannibal and Clarice was also based on mutual respect, admiration and humor. How could the story end any differently and remain true to these two characters?

Better than the movie. . .
This book is everything I expected and more. Without giving away details, I'll just say that the ending was stunning. This book was intense, shocking and brutal. I can't believe people complain about the gore in this book. It is a book about Hannibal Lecter, what did people expect? All I can say is that anyone who has not read this book yet should. You are in for a treat as this book is more encompassing and better than the movie. I cannot wait for the next book by Thomas Harris.

Did Harris Set Out to Write a Book This Bad?
Rarely has an author disappointed his loyal fans more than this, Thomas Harris' follow-up to the excellent RED DRAGON and SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. Having created one of the most deliciously evil characters in fiction with Hannibal Lecter, Harris decides to squander it.

Harris is an excellent writer, and that shines through here. Easy to read without being simplistic, Harris creates scenes that seem genuine and real, and describes situations that allow us to project ourselves into them. And sure, much of the action in HANNIBAL is very, very good. Harris could have made this book excellent without substantially changing much of the plot. Alas, it was not to be, and the problems are severe.

Of course, there is the atrocious ending. In the SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, Clarice Starling represented the archetype of the American girl - humble country-girl origins combined with the grit and determination and an unwillingness to back down that allows her not only to pull herself up, but to meet eye-to-eye someone like Lecter, whose genius is matched by his patronizing attitudes towards those of the lower classes.

In HANNIBAL, Starling is a pathetic basket case, pure and simple. In his portrayal of Starling, Harris destroys another great character.

Further, and equally problematic, is that Harris erodes Lecter's persona of evil in two ways. He describes Lecter's background to partially explain why he turned out as he did. Bad mistake. Lecter's evil should have been kept pure, evil for the sake of evil. By taking us into Lecter's background, he moves Lecter's evil away from the ontological and into the psychosocial and thereby lessens its impact. Harris also takes us on a tour of Lecter's mind. Again, this simply cheapens the impact of Lecter as an archetype of evil.

HANNIBAL really does make a reader wonder exactly what happened. How did a series with such an exceptional start get taken down this path? We may never know. But Harris should go back and write another sequel, not picking up where HANNIBAL left off, but taking us on an alternative route after SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. Writing the book that should have been written might mercifully make us forget this clunker.