Rating: 
Summary: Great Book
Review: I just have read this book(actually i ended to read it 15 minutes ago)..It's terrible thing. I actually identify with all the characters in that book - that's terrible too..
Now I'm scared to sleep again
Rating:
Summary: Every bit as good as "Silence" & "Hannibal"
Review: Harris' consistency is really impressive. I didn't expect either "Hannibal" or "Dragon" to be as good as "Silence," but in their own ways they are. If you can, start with "Red Dragon," then read the other two ... but the books also stand alone & can be read out of sequence. There was more of Hannibal Lecter than I expected in "Dragon" (I'd heard he had virtually no role & that's not the case) ... but it turns out Lecter isn't a requirement for a good Harris novel. In this one, both the hero (Will Graham) & the primary villain (Francis Dolarhyde) are extremely well drawn. I like how Harris is willing to blur edges, which is true to life: we see a relatively nice side to Dolarhyde (some humanity shown with a date) & we see not-so-nice sides of Graham (how strongly he identifies with murderers) & this is true to real life, which lacks black & white most of the time & has more gray. Why is Graham good at what he does? Because he can relate to the villains he hunts. ... This is an excellent, thoroughly enjoyable start to a trilogy & it's basically flawless, with the exception of a couple of pages of weak dialog. ... Well worth a read & I guess if I had to rank the three it'd be 1. "Lamb," 2. "Dragon," & 3. "Hannibal," though they're all of a very close & outstanding standard. Worth the money & time.
Rating: 
Summary: A warm-up to "Silence of the Lambs"
Review: I've read the Hannibal trilogy in a strange order. "Red Dragon" is the last of the three I have read. My initial intention for reading "Red Dragon" is to read more of Hannibal Lector. Unfortunately he makes an all too short appearance. He is merely a side character. Will Graham is the main character. He captures Lecture though not in this novel. "Red Dragon" just introduces us to Hannibal and then moves on to Graham tracking down the Red Dragon.
Harris's characters set his novels apart from other thrillers. Particularly interesting to me is the intertwining of literature into each novel. I am not a reader of thrillers and it was with great skepticism that I read Silence of the Lambs in a fiction writing course only to discover something worthwhile about reading Thomas Harris. "Red Dragon" comes from a sketch by William Blake and a few of his poems to influence Francis Dolarhyde .
Compared to "Silence of the Lambs" and "Hannibal", "Red Dragon" spends more time on less. It covers Graham still dealing with almost being killed by Lector and other aspects of his past as well as giving a complete background of Francis. It lets the reader see why both characters act they way they do in the time span of "Red Dragon". Harris does a wonderful job of surprising the reader but not so much to annoy you. Twice I jumped with surprise as the novel makes an unforeshadowed turn. Myself along with the other characters greatly underestimate Dolarhyde.
One shame with writer's like Thomas Harris is the number of years between novels but the amount of time an effort devoted on each book to put them above writers who crank out a novel like a fast food chain.
Rating: 
Summary: Lecter and Starling definately add something
Review: I like books like Red Dragon. Creepy and suspenseful. But this isn't Harris's best. This is his second book and the prelude to Silence of the Lambs, though it isn't nesscicery to read in order to understand Silence. Don't believe the cover either, though we do meet the famous Dr. Lecter, it is brief, Lecter doesn't hold a major part in the story. Unlike Silence and Hannibal, the strong main character of Clarice Starling is absent. The main character is Will Graham, an FBI agent who left the force after bagging Lecter (Lecter didn't go without a fight). But now he must come back to stop a psyco, who kills entire families, and who calls himself the Red Dragon. The book was exciting and i liked it, but something was missing. In the next two books following Red Dragon (Silence and Hannibal), there is Clarice Starling, a strong female main character. There is also Dr. Lecter, a VERY strong villian. His and Starling's chemistry is what i think made the next 2 books so brilliant. Not that the Red Dragon isn't interesting. I loved how the villian struggled with this spirit in him, like a split-personality, very nice and made for an interesting character. I will say this though, i didn't like how Harris cramed the surprise ending into like 2 pages, read the book you'll know what i'm talking about. All in all, I liked Red Dragon, and where it was lacking Harris made up for in his later novels. A nice read.
Rating:
Summary: Unfair to parents and psychiatrists
Review: It is a well written page turner. My main main objection is the attempt to explain Dollarby's crimes in terms of his unhappy childhood. Amongst the victims of the most vicious criminals are their innocent parents who, in most cases (such as McVeigh and Gancy) have done their best for their children and are stigmatized by this kind of spurious pop psychology, derived from old Hollywood movie versions of psychoanalysis. It is possible for parents to screw up their children but they are seldom to blame for their children's crimes.
As a psychiatrist, I may be a little prejudiced against Thomas Harris. Very few of my colleagues are like Dr Lecter.
Rating:
Summary: Wow!
Review: This is an excellent novel. It's hardly gory at all. Will Graham, with the help of Jack Crawford, searches for a killer (Francis Dolarhyde) called the Tooth Fairy, then it is switched to Red Dragon. He is planning a third murder. He only murders on full moon nights. Then he befriends a young blind woman and he changes. He is presumed dead after an attempted murder. Then, the plot twists.............This novel was well written, but Hannibal had a more important role in "The Silence Of The Lambs." The killer is as disturbing as "Buffalo Bill" in "Silence." I recommend this book to mystery fans.
Rating:
Summary: Great read
Review: Great read, couldn't put it down. Harris allows the reader to see inside the mind of a serial killer, who has been slaughtering entire families. Hannibal Lector plays a small role in the story, and Will Graham is a great hero.
Rating:
Summary: Dark, disturbing, great
Review: There will be a time, when the book "Red Dragon" will be as famous as his follow-ups "Silence of the Lambs" and "Hannibal", because it's said that it will be filmed soon. Well, again, since it already was some years ago, when no one knew of Hannibal Lecter. Maybe when this time comes, it will be realized that this is Thomas Harris' best work till now and I think, will be. The novel is about the profiler Will Graham, who gets the mission to track down a new serial killer, the Red Dragon, who has killed already two families and will kill more if no one stops him. On his mission, he gets more involved in the case than he wanted to. Well, yes, Graham knows Lecter and he also appears in the book and plays an important role, but the book is not about him, and maybe that's why it's so good. "Silence of the Lambs" contained more Lecter, was still pretty good and "Hannibal" contained only Lecter and was not so good at all. The first two show when Hannibal works the best. When he's locked away and shows his power, which can't be locked. In "Hannibal" he's just and old man, who's clever, but unknown and uninteresting. But enough of this. "Red Dragon" is the best book about a fictional serial killer that I have read up to now. It's extremely suspenseful, very dark and brutal, clever and surprising. Its characters are brilliantly drawn, which is shown especially in the person of the "Red Dragon" himself, who is not just a madman, but has reasons for his madness. But the center of the book is Will Graham, the profiler, whose life is destroyed by his gift, to imagine the feelings of the killers. He is so torn apart, between his duty and his longing for a normal life. He's not a real hero, because he can't be happy with his talent. The visions haunt him, the murderers are still in his head and he got wounds from his job, that will never heal. Thomas Harris wrote this novel with a brilliance, he hadn't in his previous novel "Black Sunday" and which got lost more and more in the next two. If I had to think which characters I would re-use from this book I wouldn't have chosen Hannibal, but Graham. Or, imagine how interesting it would have been to read about both of their beginnings. Hannibal is only interesting if he's in prison or at least if he's still killing people and Clarice Starling is never as interesting as Will Graham. This book is a masterpiece and stands out of novels, which just went into the wrong direction. The potential he created here, was not used and this is a pity.
Rating: 
Summary: Not that good.
Review: This book did nothing for me. I am not impressed. I have read many books that kept my attention and made me hunger for more, but not this one, and there wasn't much reference to Hannibal Lecter as one might think by reading the cover and foreword. I was totally unimpressed. It was very boring and I found myself skipping ahead to find the action.
Rating:
Summary: My ALLTIME favorite novel
Review: Francis Dolarhyde makes Hannibal Lecter look like a pussycat. Superbly written. Great plot... from the way the killer selects his victims to the cat and mouse chess match that ensues to a well thought out ending. this book has everything you could ask for in a thriller. A+
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