Rating: 
Summary: A great and easy read
Review: As we all know this is the story where the good Dr. Hannibal Lecter makes his first appearance. Even though the book is not about him and he is only a supporting character, he still manages to play a major role.
Now with that cleared up lets move on to the characters. Gram first. He is my favorite agent out of all three Hannibal related books. Next well deal with killer. He was great. I just found him so interesting. I mean there is nothing ground breaking here but the author just makes you hungery to know whats going on in his head. All of the supporting staff are very competent and do not bog the story down.
The story is very, very solid and told exceptionally well. It is also an easy read and should not take all that long to finish. Now out of the three books I would probably have to say that this is my favorite. Not by much. Only by a very very small margin. There is just something special about it.
Rating: 
Summary: Good book
Review: Good book, kept my attention very well. It's about a retired FBI manhunter named Will Graham. Who is brought back to the FBI to track down a new, psychotic killer on the loose. A madman who's been slaughtering families one by one in violent ways. Will Graham has a special gift that he must use to catch the killer, he must think like the killer. He used this methods years before to track down serial killer Dr. Hannibal the Cannibal Lecter. A man who once was simply Dr. Hannibal, a psychiatrist who went mad and murdered his patients one by one. Now he's in prison thanks to Graham, and Graham is going to ask for his help in catching this madman on the loose. While reporter Freddy Lounds is kidnaped by the killer, who calls himself the Red Dragon. Pretty good book, id recommend it to almost anybody.
Rating:
Summary: unsettling
Review: Harris first rocketed up the bestseller lists with his excellent terrorism thriller Black Sunday. His antihero Hannibal the Cannibal exploded into the public consciousness after Jonathan Demme's excellent movie version of Silence of the Lambs (1991) came out, with Anthony Hopkins brilliant creepy performance as Lecter. And, of course, fans and Hollywood have had an anxious 11 year wait for Harris to finally publish a sequel. But many people may not realize that Hannibal Lecter first appeared, albeit in a cameo role, in the novel Red Dragon and in Michael Mann's capable movie version, Manhunter (1986). If you've missed this book, I urge you to try it; in many ways it is Harris's best work. FBI Special Will Graham has retired to Sugar Loaf Key, FL with his new wife Molly and her son Willie. Retired because of his nearly fatal encounter with a linoleum knife wielding Hannibal Lecter, whose capture he was responsible for, and because of the emotional troubles that have accompanied his ability to develop an almost extrasensory empathy for such killers, such that he has trouble purging their feelings from his own psyche. His peaceful idyll is disrupted when his old boss, Jack Crawford, shows up and asks for his help in catching The Tooth Fairy, a serial killer who is notorious for the tooth marks he leaves and for dicing his victims with shards of broken mirrors. Reluctantly agreeing to join the chase, Graham decides, in order to recapture the mindset that has made him so eerily effective in prior cases, to visit Hannibal Lecter in the Chesapeake State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. There the administrator, Dr. Frederick Chilton, shares an anecdote about Hannibal that demonstrates just how horrible he is: "On the afternoon of July 8, 1976, Dr. Lecter complained of chest pain. His restraints were removed in the examining room to make it easier to give him an electrocardiogram. One of his attendants left the room to smoke, and the other turned away for a second. The nurse was very quick and strong. She managed to save one of her eyes." "You may find this curious." He took a strip of EKG tape from a drawer and unrolled it on his desk. He traced the spiky line with his forefinger. "Here, he's resting on the examining table. Pulse seventy-two. Here, he grabs the nurse's head and pulls her down to him. Here, he is subdued by the attendant. He didn't resist, by the way, though the attendant dislocated his shoulder. Do you notice the strange thing? His pulse never got over eighty-five. Even when he tore out her tongue. I don't think we're any closer to understanding him than the day he came in.'' After tabloid reporter Freddie Lowndes splashes this visit all over the pages of The Tattler, the killer too contacts Lecter who urges him to attack Graham. Thus begins a suspenseful, violent minuet as Graham develops increasing insight into the killer's methodology and psychoses, the killer plans his next kill (he's on a Lunar schedule) and Hannibal pulls strings from the dark background. Harris provides fascinating detail on police procedure, he writes savvily about how the FBI uses the media and the inventiveness of the crimes he dreams up is genuinely disturbing. But the most interesting part of the story is the delicate mental balance that Graham has to maintain in order to think like the killers but still remain sane. And as Graham penetrates further into the killer's mind, Harris reveals more and more background about the Tooth Fairy, Francis Dolarhyde, who it turns out was a horribly misshapen baby, abandoned by his mother and raised by a demented grandmother, early on manifesting the now classic signs of the serial murder--torturing animals and the like. This background and Will Graham's troubles dealing with the thought patterns he shares with Dolarhyde raise questions about what separates us from such men and whether there's a formula for creating such evil beings. Is it really simply a matter of psychosexual abuse of young boys and, presto chango, you've created a serial killer? In addition to this kind of portrayal of the psychotic as victim, our effort to deal with these creatures has resulted in a sizable batch of thrillers where the serial killer is portrayed as a nearly superhuman genius. This flows from the same impulse that makes folks so willing to believe that assassinations are conspiracies. It is extremely hard, as a society, to face the fact that nondescript shlubs like David Berkowitz and Lee Harvey Oswald and Richard Speck and James Earl Ray are really capable of causing so much social disruption. Their crimes are so monumental that we want the killers to be equal in stature to the crimes. The sad truth of the matter is that these monsters are, in fact, generally hapless losers. They are not Lecterlike geniuses. That said, Hannibal is still one of the great fictional creations of recent times, our age's version of Dracula or Frankenstein, and Harris's imaginative story makes for a great, albeit unsettling, read with more food for thought than most novels of the type. GRADE: A
Rating: 
Summary: Horror like I never hope to meet
Review: Having seen both Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon movies, it was interesting to listen to the book on tape. As movies go, Silence seems the more powerful. But this book is enough to make anyone's skin crawl. And it isn't just the nature of the crimes or the killer that is spooky. Will Graham, one of the FBI's profilers, is able to get inside the head of killers like Hannibal Lecter, the man he managed to put away, but not before being so badly injured that he nearly died. Because of that experience, he quit the FBI. When Jack Crawford asks for his help with a new serial killer, nicknamed The Tooth Fairy, Will's sense of responsibility makes him accept the assignment. Little does he know that this assignment will endanger him and those he loves. In many ways, Harris established the basis for this sort of thriller. The one thing that spoils this recording is the narrator. His tone, often when reading the women's dialogue, is whiney and he isn't as able as some narrators to use different voices to differentiate between characters. That was a bit distracting and made it difficult to follow at times, esp when the listener leaves the story and comes back to it. Still, Red Dragon is interesting and powerful, whether in print or on audio.
Rating:
Summary: MY FIRST INTRODUCTION TO THOMAS HARRIS.
Review: I found and read this book many years ago and haven't left a window in the house uncovered since! Loved it so much that I've bought many copies through the years to give away to others who ask, "Read any good books lately?"
Rating:
Summary: Excellent Work, Despite the Foreseen Ending
Review: In the first installment of Thomas Harris's glimpse into the world of Hannibal Lecter, Red Dragon emerges as a gripping crime/horror novel that far exceeds the film version. Will Graham, a retired FBI agent who was nearly killed by Dr. Lecter, is called upon in his Florida home to investigate the all too similar murders of two families. Needing insight into the mind of a methodical psychopath, Graham decides to visit the "Cannibal", who deftly manipulates both Graham and the killer, Francis Dolarhyde.
Harris's penetration into the mind of a deranged killer is exquisite, utilizing flashbacks to Dolarhyde's past where the reader learns of Francis's birth as a deformed child to an unloving mother. As the novel unravels, the reader is able to amass the twisted physical and emotional abuse that ultimately fuels Dolarhyde's alter ego as the Great Red Dragon. Harris masterfully glimpses into the minds of Graham and Dolarhyde, revealing the scarred psyche of an ingenious detective, wrestling with his emotions, and the haunted mind of a child who has grown into a serial killer.
Though Harris creates a fantastic thriller with excellent character development, the ending to the novel is highly predictable. When the reader reaches the last few pages of the book, it is rather simple to discern what events will unfold. Despite this fact, the novel itself is brimming with eerie details that will follow readers throughout the length of the piece that triumph over the almost obvious ending.
Rating:
Summary: Predictable
Review: It starts off strongly but it eventually falls into some pretty predictable plot lines for this genre. I don't know if its because Red Dragon has inspired other books or if Harris was pulling from the same sources that the other books pulled from too.
Rating:
Summary: An overlooked creepy classic
Review: Many people have seen the movie, "Silence of the Lambs," and have read the book. But before "Silence" there was the "Red Dragon." This book is creepier, scarier and more suspenseful than the more famous "Silence." I read this book long before "Silence" and was mesmerized. It's about Will Graham, an ex-FBI agent, who is manipulated by his former FBI boss into joining the hunt for a brutal serial killer, who they call the Tooth Fairy because he bites his victims, but who calls himself the Red Dragon. Graham can reach a place in himself where he thinks and feels like serial killers. He has used his talents in the past to understand serial killer's motivations and predict their movements. He caught Hannibal the Cannibal using this ability and almost lost his life when Hannibal attacked him. He hates his "gift," it scares him because he fears there is a fine line between him and a mass murderer, and Hannibal knows it. In Hannibal's super genuis style he tortures Graham with his own terror of himself, and encourages the Red Dragon in his killing spree. The really horific part of the story, however, is that there may be a very fine line between mass muderers and us. Harris gives a truly creepy look into the mind of multiple murderer, Francis Dolarhyde. He graphically portrays Dolarhyde's brutal childhood, and not only do we sypathize, we see the logic of what he's doing. We understand why he kills, and what his killing symbolizes to him. We even feel sorry for him. For example, Dolarhyde breaks all the mirrors in the houses of his victims because he hates the sight of himself. At the same time he inserts pieces of the mirrors in the victim's eyes so they will *see* him. The sorrow and pity generated for the victims and killer is intense. It leads us to question whether we, too, could kill given the right, or wrong, set of circumstanses. Too creepy! The book also gives an interesting view into the workings of the FBI's serial crimes division. Harris describes the forensics process for hair and fiber samples, fingerprints, bite marks, and other details. And we get a fascinating glimpse of the psychological profile process. This book is not for the sqemish, the murder scenes are graphic and bloody and the story is intense. But, if you're looking for a thriller that goes deeper than the usual and has real characters, then this is the book for you. Just don't read it when you're alone at night, it will scare the pants off you!!
Rating:
Summary: A Superior Serial Killer Novel
Review: Red Dragon is an exciting and grisly crime novel which is brilliantly written in a taught and deceptively simple prose style. We are introduced to Dr. Hannibal Lecter in this book and it is a great introduction, setting up the action which continues in The Silence of the Lambs (a book I also gave a five stared review). In this book the villain is Francis Dolarhyde, a man with an exceptionally shocking past. I especially liked the inclusion of several chapters about his childhood because they accomplish the seemingly impossible, to make you feel real sympathy for him because the cruelty he suffered as a boy was horrific. The sections of the book where Dolarhyde is alone with Reba McClane really got my pulse racing because Reba's blindness made her extremely vulnerable to him. The plot was excellent and very twisted, involving several shocking and uncomfortable developments which had me biting my nails rather a lot! Will Graham, the FBI investigator, was also a well developed character and I was willing him to succeed throughout. Overall I would recommend Red Dragon to those who like to read tense and beautifully written crime novels - and can put up with the gruesome and scary parts which are quite disturbing. Like The Silence of the Lambs, Red Dragon is a superior serial killer novel and a must read for crime fiction fans JoAnne
Rating:
Summary: No masterpiece but still very good
Review: This is the first book in the famous Lecter trilogy. In it, Hannibal does not have a prominent role but rather it focuses on Will Graham, the agent who caught Hannibal. Traumatised to the point of retirement, he's brought back years later to use his "special gift" in investigating another brutal serial killer. Personally, I'm not very much into crime/horror/serial killer novels but I saw Red Dragon at the movies and loved it and the book certainly didn't disappoint. The characterisation is extremely graphic in terms of the reader really getting to know Graham and the killer intimately. The vividness of their demons is what gives this book it's intended creepiness, not the crimes themselves, brutal as they are. The one thing I found was that the novel wasn't much better than the movie (in most adaptations I think the book tends to be better and more in depth) - I'm not sure whether it's that the film was made so well that it covered almost all of the book's content or the book's pop-prose style made it less tightly packed (or possibly both). Either way, it's a very good read and Harris deserves the popularity based on this work alone.
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