Rating: 
Summary: Starts with a bang, ends with a whimper!
Review: I was very excited about the sequel to "Silence of the Lambs". However, when I received the book and started to read it I became more and more disenchanted. I feel Mr. Harris did a great injustice to the characters of Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling. The ending cheapened the entire book for me. I had the feeling Mr. Harris wrote himself into a corner and didn't know where to go from there. I was truly disappointed. By pass this one, and reread "The Silence of the Lambs".
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: So many years after "Silence", maybe I expected too much. But I feel that in "Hannibal", Thomas Harris doesn't stay true to the characters he created. First he kills off John Brigham, then Jack Crawford. Then, as if that weren't enough, Clarice's entire personality gets a remolding. Granted, some mind-altering drugs were involved, but still...the denouement was extremely hard to swallow (pun intended). I found it a cheap, sexually-oriented ploy worthy only of Fred Chilton, not Clarice Starling. We are supposed to LIKE Hannibal now? Like he's just a misunderstood guy with continental tastes, and the rest of us poor plebes couldn't possibly understand? The "gore" that is so hyped is of the variety that just gives me the rolling-eyed, "oh, right!" rather than the creepy, skin-crawly, heart pounding, horrified sensation that the even more violent "Silence" gave me. And Barney seemed a noble character in "Silence", now he's just a con artist and a thief? Tsk! The descriptions of Florence are exquisite, but don't make up for a facile story. Conclusion: a long-anticipated, but terribly disappointing book. Clarice, we thought we knew ye!
Rating: 
Summary: Lions & Tigers & Bears Oh my!
Review: If this is the sequel you've been awaiting, then you're going to be thrilled with Hannibal. While Harris has written some good books, this one fails. Starling's relative innocence juxtaposed against Hannibal's evil was one of the attractions of Silence of the Lambs. Hardening her character undermines the new work hugely. The shifts in person, number and tense are annoying, but it is the change in character that makes Hannibal so irksome. This novel should've been a good book and is not. What in the world is Starling going to do in the movie? Surely it'll be different.
Rating: 
Summary: Doesn't anybody get satire anymore?
Review: C'mon, this is FICTION, I found Hannibal absorbing and amusing. Not to mention having the best revenge scene I've EVER seen in a book. Yes, it does require both a willing suspension of disbelief and a reasonable appreciation of satire, something it seems that many readers just don't get.
Rating:
Summary: Absolutely delicious!
Review: "Hannibal" is superlative... a rare delicacy among modern popular fiction. Don't expect a copycat sequel to "Silence of the Lambs". This is an original, audacious work that is as stylish and engrossing as it is nightmarishly disturbing. The finale is OUT OF THIS WORLD!
Rating: 
Summary: Ending was a big suprise!!
Review: The first 150 pages were rather slow but once you got into the book it was a fabulous and fast read. I couldn't wait to get to the next chapter to see would happen next!! The ending was a real surprise and not at all like I had imagined it would end. A great summer read.
Rating: 
Summary: What happened to the ending of such a good book?
Review: This book started off brilliantly. The new characters were superb and the story line was fantastic. Harris did well to prevent Lecter becoming mundane and 'normal' by establishing his exquisite taste which he never compromised in the new book. I found the constant references to comments Lecter and Clarice made in Silence a little tedious at times. It was the weird and obscure ending which I feel really let this book down. I can't believe such a strong character as Clarice could have been so easily thrown out of the FBI without a damn good fight or choose a life with Lecter? It was very unsatisfactory the way Starlings disappearance was glossed over too. Very odd and disappointing.
Rating:
Summary: A tasty meal
Review: I'm sorry for all of those reviewers out there who despised the ending, were not captivated with the look into Lecter's mind, and as one review adamantly said,"the poor use of commas." This is a great book! Lecter is his scariest, because at points you can relate to him, you have to call yourself back and remember that he's a serial killer and your not supposed to like him. Many have said there is not enough gore in the book either, all I have to say are the pigs and the eel, buy this book, it is worth the money.
Rating:
Summary: Sympathy for the Devil
Review: I waited so long for the sequel. I presumed I would be disappointed. I figured we would get another serial-killer, another flirtation-pursuit between Lecter and Starling, another tidy ending where Starling becomes director of the FBI and Lecter (I was hoping) gets away at the end to wreak havoc in a future book. But Harris isn't Patricia Cornwell and he refused to fill his market niche. He may write the world's best police procedurals, but he obviously isn't content just to give the public what the public expects. Hannibal shows Harris is incapable of being a hack. I've read Hannibal three times now. Each time I have come away with a different impression of the novel - and it's a novel, not a pulp-fiction thriller at all. The first time I read it I thought it was a brilliant black-comic, Southern-Gothic extravaganza : only Harris could write that one of the leading characters, after committing murder, came to regret her actions because of all the attention the tabloids were giving her! Then I re-read the book and saw a fresco of what American society is at the end of the century : full of sound and fury, violence and madness, a tabloid culture baying for the blood of the designated Villain of the Month (Clinton, Hannibal Lecter and finally Clarice Starling..), a place where good and evil have been supplanted by political manoeuvring, corrupt bureaucracies - a world where a decent heroine can never find the honor that is her due. But on reading Hannibal a third time (while still discovering jokes I'd missed on the previous two occasions - Hannibal is also extremely funny) - I was struck by the doom-laden atmosphere of the final chapters, the almost Visconti-like feeling. Beneath all the brutality, Harris has the gentleness of heart to grant some measure of redemption to characters who have been prisoners of their pasts, incapable of shaking off the tentacles of the dead. Thomas Harris is no longer just the world's finest writer of police procedurals. With Hannibal, he has become America's foremost novelist, unwilling to bend to convention or respect any commercial agenda. Bravo!
Rating:
Summary: Probably one of the worst books ever written.
Review: Hannibal is a just plain lousy book. Thomas Harris appears to be mocking his loyal readers by giving them a poorly constructed plot and a ludicrous ending. Perhaps that is why he has not written a book in over ten years. He spends more time in telling us about Italian Renaissance History as relating to the Italian cop and what pigs can do to a poor soul than framing a concise narrative.The villains are boring and Hannibal himself appears at times to be a good guy. As for the future of Clarice Starling, the book makes me totally uninterested in her fate.
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