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.


The New York Times Book Review, Stephen King
Hannibal is really not a sequel at all, but rather the third and most satisfying part of one very long and scary ride through the haunted palace of abnormal psychiatry.


Entertainment Weekly, Owen Gleiberman
His brilliance as a writer has always been his ability to lure you into a conspiratorial relationship with the most scandalous extremes of his imagination.


The Wall Street Journal, Bob Hughes
With Hannibal, Mr. Harris has devised an unlikely, unsentimental romance out of invidious deeds.


From AudioFile
Hannibal Lecter, the gruesome serial killer who escaped at the end of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, is living high off the hog in Florence when he discovers (through nefarious channels) that his FBI nemesis, Clarice Starling, is in the midst of a career crisis. Falling prey to his obsession with her, he inadvertently sets himself up to be captured, not by the FBI, but by a mortal enemy who intends to feed him alive to wild boars. Reader Thomas Harris has plumbed the inner depths of the monstrous Lecter--after all, he created him--and his familiarity, not surprisingly, informs his energetic reading. The surprise is his portrayal of Clarice Starling, who is utterly credible as the young victim of class and gender distinctions in the FBI. In tones that reveal both femininity and determination, Harris's voice embodies the personal history that makes her so vulnerable and so ambitious. Smatterings of precise Italian also makes perfectly believable Lecter's Florentine pursuers. E.K.D. (c) AudioFile, Portland, Maine


Review
"Strap yourself in for one heck of a ride -- it'll scare your socks off."
-- The Denver Post

"Relentless -- endlessly terrifying."
-- Los Angeles Times

"Interested in getting the hell scared out of you? Buy this book on a Friday ... lock all doors and windows. And by Monday, you might just be able to sleep without a night-light."
-- Newsday

Don't miss Thomas Harris's New York Times bestsellers:
Red Dragon
Black Sunday


Review
"Strap yourself in for one heck of a ride -- it'll scare your socks off."
-- The Denver Post

"Relentless -- endlessly terrifying."
-- Los Angeles Times

"Interested in getting the hell scared out of you? Buy this book on a Friday ... lock all doors and windows. And by Monday, you might just be able to sleep without a night-light."
-- Newsday

Don't miss Thomas Harris's New York Times bestsellers:
Red Dragon
Black Sunday


Book 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--.

Hannibal



From the Inside Flap
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....


From the Back Cover
"Strap yourself in for one heck of a ride--.it'll scare your socks off."
-- The Denver Post

"Relentless-- endlessly terrifying."
-- Los Angeles Times

"Interested in getting the hell scared out of you? buy this book on a Friday...lock all doors and windows. And by Monday, you might just be able to sleep without a night-light."
-- Newsday

Don't Miss Thomas Harris's New York Times Bestsellers
Red Dragon
Black Sunday




About the Author
A native of Mississippi, Thomas Harris began his writing career covering crime in the United States and Mexico, and was a reporter and editor for the Associated Press in New York City. His first novel, Black Sunday, was published in 1975, followed by Red Dragon in 1981, and The Silence of the Lambs in 1988.


Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Chapter 21

The Christian martyr San Miniato picked up his severed head from the sand of the Roman amphitheater in Florence and carried it beneath his arm to the mountainside across the river where he lies in his splendid church, tradition says.

Certainly San Miniato's body, erect or not, passed en route along the ancient street where we now stand, the Via de' Bardi. The evening gathers now and the street is empty, the fan pattern of the cobbles shining in a winter drizzle not cold enough to kill the smell of cats. We are among the palaces built six hundred years ago by the merchant princes, the kingmakers and connivers of Renaissance Florence. Within bow-shot across the Arno River are the cruel spikes of the Signoria, where the monk Savonarola was hanged and burned, and that great meat house of hanging Christs, the Uffizi museum.

These family palaces, pressed together in an ancient street, frozen in the modern Italian bureaucracy, are prison architecture on the outside, but they contain great and graceful spaces, high silent halls no one ever sees, draped with rotting, rain-streaked silk where lesser works of the great Renaissance masters hang in the dark for years, and are illuminated by the lightning after the draperies collapse.

Here beside you is the palazzo of the Capponi, a family distinguished for a thousand years, who tore up a French king's ultimatum in his face and produced a pope.

The windows of the Palazzo Capponi are dark now, behind their iron grates. The torch rings are empty. In that pane of crazed old glass is a bullet hole from the 1940s. Go closer. Rest your head against the cold iron as the policeman did and listen. Faintly you can hear a clavier. Bach's Goldberg Variations played, not perfectly, but exceedingly well, with an engaging understanding of the music. Played not perfectly, but exceedingly well; there is perhaps a slight stiffness in the left hand.

If you believe you are beyond harm, will you go inside? Will you enter this palace so prominent in blood and glory, follow your face through the web-spanned dark, toward the exquisite chiming of the clavier? The alarms cannot see us. The wet policeman lurking in the doorway cannot see us. Come . . .

Inside the foyer the darkness is almost absolute. A long stone staircase, the stair rail cold beneath our sliding hand, the steps scooped by the hundreds of years of footfalls, uneven beneath our feet as we climb toward the music.

The tall double doors of the main salon would squeak and howl if we had to open them. For you, they are open. The music comes from the far, far corner, and from the corner comes the only light, light of many candles pouring reddish through the small door of a chapel off the corner of the room.

Cross to the music. We are dimly aware of passing large groups of draped furniture, vague shapes not quite still in the candlelight, like a sleeping herd. Above us the height of the room disappears into darkness.

The light glows redly on an ornate clavier and on the man known to Renaissance scholars as Dr. Fell, the doctor elegant, straight-backed as he leans into the music, the light reflecting off his hair and the back of his quilted silk dressing gown with a sheen like pelt.

The raised cover of the clavier is decorated with an intricate scene of banquetry, and the little figures seem to swarm in the candlelight above the strings. He plays with his eyes closed. He has no need of the sheet music. Before him on the lyre-shaped music rack of the clavier is a copy of the American trash tabloid the National Tattler. It is folded to show only the face on the front page, the face of Clarice Starling.

Our musician smiles, ends the piece, repeats the saraband once for his own pleasure and as the last quill-plucked string vibrates to silence in the great room, he opens his eyes, each pupil centered with a red pinpoint of light. He tilts his head to the side and looks at the paper before him.

He rises without sound and carries the American tabloid into the tiny, ornate chapel, built before the discovery of America. As he holds it up to the light of the candles and unfolds it, the religious icons above the altar seem to read the tabloid over his shoulder, as they would in a grocery line. The type is seventy-two-point Railroad Gothic. It says "DEATH ANGEL: CLARICE STARLING, THE FBI'S KILLING MACHINE."

Faces painted in agony and beatitude around the altar fade as he snuffs the candles. Crossing the great hall he has no need of light. A puff of air as Dr. Hannibal Lecter passes us. The great door creaks, closes with a thud we can feel in the floor. Silence.

Footsteps entering another room. In the resonances of this place, the walls feel closer, the ceiling still high--sharp sounds echo late from above--and the still air holds the smell of vellum and parchment and extinguished candlewicks.

The rustle of paper in the dark, the squeak and scrape of a chair. Dr. Lecter sits in a great armchair in the fabled Capponi Library. His eyes reflect light redly, but they do not glow red in the dark, as some of his keepers have sworn they do. The darkness is complete. He is considering. . . .

It is true that Dr. Lecter created the vacancy at the Palazzo Capponi by removing the former curator--a simple process requiring a few seconds' work on the old man and a modest outlay for two bags of cement--but once the way was clear he won the job fairly, demonstrating to the Belle Arti Committee an extraordinary linguistic capability, sight-translating medieval Italian and Latin from the densest Gothic black-letter manuscripts.

He has found a peace here that he would preserve--he has killed hardly anybody, except his predecessor, during his residence in Florence.

His appointment as translator and curator of the Capponi Library is a considerable prize to him for several reasons:

The spaces, the height of the palace rooms, are important to Dr. Lecter after his years of cramped confinement. More important, he feels a resonance with the palace; it is the only private building he has ever seen that approaches in dimension and detail the memory palace he has maintained since youth.

In the library, this unique collection of manuscripts and correspondence going back to the early thirteenth century, he can indulge a certain curiosity about himself.

Dr. Lecter believed, from fragmentary family records, that he was descended from a certain Giuliano Bevisangue, a fearsome twelfth-century figure in Tuscany, and from the Machiavelli as well as the Visconti. This was the ideal place for research. While he had a certain abstract curiosity about the matter, it was not ego-related. Dr. Lecter does not require conventional reinforcement. His ego, like his intelligence quota, and the degree of his rationality, is not measurable by conventional means.

In fact, there is no consensus in the psychiatric community that Dr. Lecter should be termed a man. He has long been regarded by his professional peers in psychiatry, many of whom fear his acid pen in the professional journals, as something entirely Other. For convenience they term him "monster."

The monster sits in the black library, his mind painting colors on the dark and a medieval air running in his head. He is considering the policeman.

Click of a switch and a low lamp comes on.

Now we can see Dr. Lecter seated at a sixteenth-century refectory table in the Capponi Library. Behind him is a wall of pigeonholed manuscripts and great canvas-covered ledgers going back eight hundred years. A fourteenth-century correspondence with a minister of the Republic of Venice is stacked before him, weighted with a small casting Michelangelo did as a study for his horned Moses, and in front of the inkstand, a laptop computer with on-line research capability through the University of Milan.

Bright red and blue among the dun and yellow piles of parchment and vellum is a copy of the National Tattler. And beside it, the Florence edition of La Nazione.

Dr. Lecter selects the Italian newspaper and reads its latest attack on Rinaldo Pazzi, prompted by an FBI disclaimer in the case of Il Mostro. "Our profile never matched Tocca," an FBI spokesman said.

La Nazione cited Pazzi's background and training in America, at the famous Quantico academy, and said he should have known better.

The case of Il Mostro did not interest Dr. Lecter at all, but Pazzi's background did. How unfortunate that he should encounter a policeman trained at Quantico, where Hannibal Lecter was a textbook case.  

When Dr. Lecter looked into Rinaldo Pazzi's face at the Palazzo Vecchio, and stood close enough to smell him, he knew for certain that Pazzi suspected nothing, even though he had asked about the scar on Dr. Lecter's hand. Pazzi did not even have any serious interest in him regarding the curator's disappearance.

The policeman saw him at the exposition of torture instruments. Better to have encountered him at an orchid show.

Dr. Lecter was well aware that all the elements of epiphany were present in the policeman's head, bouncing at random with the million other things he knew.

Should Rinaldo Pazzi join the late curator of the Palazzo Vecchio down in the damp? Should Pazzi's body be found after an apparent suicide? La Nazione would be pleased to have hounded him to death.

Not now, the monster reflected, and turned to his great rolls of vellum and parchment manuscripts.

Dr. Lecter does not worry. He delighted in the writing style of Neri Capponi, banker and emissary to Venice in the fifteenth century, and read his letters, aloud from time to time, for his own pleasure late into the night.

FROM OUR EDITORS

Luckily for us, seven years is all the R and R creator Thomas Harris allowed his brilliant, mad, and strangely charming Dr. Hannibal Lecter. Yes, the better part of a decade elapsed after then-FBI trainee Clarice Starling exposed her haunting childhood memory to the fascinated Lecter. Though Lecter assured Starling, at the end of The Silence of the Lambs, that he believed the world a better place with her in it, all that may change in Hannibal, as the doctor reawakens Starling's nightmare.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Dr. Hannibal Lecter, the serial killer from The Silence of the Lambs whose portrayal on film earned Anthony Hopkins an Academy Award, and who for many, is the ultimate villain in modern fiction, is back with a vengeance. ￯﾿ﾽHannibal the Cannibal￯﾿ﾽ is at the center of the first novel in more than a decade by his creator, Thomas Harris.

Hannibal also features the reappearance from The Silence of the Lambs of FBI Special Agent Clarice Starling, portrayed in the movie by Jodie Foster, who also won an Oscar for her performance. The new novel opens seven years after Dr. Lecter￯﾿ﾽs stunning escape from the authorities, the climax of the earlier book, as one of his earlier victims uses Agent Starling as bait to draw the doctor into an intricate and unspeakable design for revenge.

SYNOPSIS

Seven years after Dr. Hannibal Lecter's escape from the authorities, the climax of Silence of the Lambs, one of his earlier victims uses Agent Starling as bait to draw the doctor into an intricate and unspeakable design for revenge.

FROM THE CRITICS

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt - The New York Times

...[G]reat is the fund of fascination with Lecter built up in Mr. Harris's previous novels — for his being a superman embodying absolute yet comprehensible evil...that almost nothing can dissipate his malign attraction....Hannibal remains full of wonderful touches, typical of Mr. Harris's grasp of arcane detail.

Publishers Weekly

Hannibal the cannibal is back again, and in this special audio version, listeners are treated to the author's unique and riveting interpretation of his characters' voices and personalities. Having escaped captivity in The Silence of the Lambs, Dr. Hannibal Lecter has been living on the sly in Europe, leading the life of a sophisticated, academic gentleman. But Hannibal has left behind one sloppy mistake: a victim named Mason Verger, who was accused of molesting his own children but managed to avoid jail provided he sought psychiatric treatment with Dr. Lecter. Hannibal has left Verger barely alive, and, bent on revenge, this man who is as much a monster as Hannibal buys off a cadre of corrupt government agents to find his nemesis. (As an interesting aside for listeners, Hannibal has left Verger lipless, and Harris's vocal rendition of this character is particularly eerie.) Simultaneously, Clarice Starling, the FBI agent who sought Dr. Lecter's assistance in finding another killer in The Silence of the Lambs, is also on his trail, while, in turn, Hannibal is seeking Clarice, for whom he shows a curious affection. As the two eventually find each other, the listener is treated to an incredibly disturbing and shocking conclusion. (Feb.) Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.

Library Journal

Hannibal is, of course, Harris's long-awaited sequel to The Silence of the Lambs, which so thoroughly propelled the brilliant psychiatrist-cannibal into the popular imagination. We catch up with Lecter in Florence where he is living a scholarly life and rarely murders anyone but is still obsessed with FBI special agent Clarice Starling. He is nearly captured in Florence, after which the FBI and Starling are back on his trail. Also tracking Lecter is another monster, Mason Verger, his only surviving victim. Verger is mutilated, paralyzed, and on a respirator but has resources enough at his disposal to co-opt and manipulate the FBI's investigation in his quest for vengeance. The strong and likable Starling is doubly betrayed, first by the FBI and then by Harris himself, as the novel stumbles to its bizarre and unlikely conclusion. The author reads his own work with remarkable skill and precision--an ironic but welcome asset to this program, which is an adequate abridgment.--Kristen L. Smith, Loras Coll. Lib., Dubuque, IA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.

AudioFile - Elizabeth K. Dodge

Hannibal Lecter, the gruesome serial killer who escaped at the end of SILENCE OF THE LAMBS, is living high off the hog in Florence when he discovers (through nefarious channels) that his FBI nemesis, Clarice Starling, is in the midst of a career crisis. Falling prey to his obsession with her, he inadvertently sets himself up to be captured, not by the FBI, but by a mortal enemy who intends to feed him alive to wild boars. Reader Thomas Harris has plumbed the inner depths of the monstrous Lecter￯﾿ﾽafter all, he created him￯﾿ﾽand his familiarity, not surprisingly, informs his energetic reading. The surprise is his portrayal of Clarice Starling, who is utterly credible as the young victim of class and gender distinctions in the FBI. In tones that reveal both femininity and determination, Harris's voice embodies the personal history that makes her so vulnerable and so ambitious. Smatterings of precise Italian also makes perfectly believable Lecter's Florentine pursuers. E.K.D. ￯﾿ﾽ AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Stephen King - The New York Times Book Review