Rating: 
Summary: I enjoyed it, read it straight through, crazy ending!
Review: Great book. Like I said, I read it straight through using every available moment to delve back into it's twisted brilliance. Hannibal Lecter is the Sherlock Holmes of evil. The ending I never expected has left me in shock. I'm still trying to come to terms with this book.
Rating: 
Summary: "Hannibal" may leave a bad taste for some.
Review: How do you follow up "The Silence of the Lambs"? First, you take your time. Next, you lay the ground rules, pretty much set by that book's most ardent fans. Finally, you need another villain, and for originality's sake, you don't want another serial killer. Thomas Harris achieves most of this in "Hannibal" but unfortunately he pushes it too far. He does present us with a real page turner that starts out at medium speed and builds momentum rapidly. Dr. Hannibal Lecter maintains his "untouchable" status throughout this tale, but some of the events that make that possible as well as information revealed about his past seem to leave us less intrigued by him and therefore not as afraid of him as we were previously. Even the tough Clarice Starling we came to admire fades into oblivion by the end, leaving very little interest for another sequel. Our new villain, Mason Verger is as scary and sick as "Lambs'" Lecter. When you realize yourself why you condider him to be a villain, you might be afraid of your own self. The stiff, Jack Crawford and the likable Barney, fomer employ of the psychiatric hospital are here as well. The sub climax, an appetizer, is very satisfying and a prelude to the main course which is truly delectable. Unfortunately and ironically though, this is where it goes sour fast. This is where Harris breaks the rules. The fate of Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling suggested at the very end is more unimaginable than any other possible scenario. No dessert, thank you. Dr. Lecter himself would be insulted.
Rating: 
Summary: Spectacular
Review: Dear Amazon Readers:Despite all the other reviews, which are downing this novel. I personally loved it. I think that much of the time peoeple are expecting there characters to be frozen in time and not grow in any manner. Clarice has grown! Lecter has grown! If there is only one book that you buy this year, it should be this one!
Rating:
Summary: More satisfying than I could imagine.
Review: This is a book with some meat in it, not just a quick summer thriller. I had been counting the days until the release, not to mention the years of hoping for some more of Hannibal. I must tell you that this is the first book that I finished reading and immediately turned to page one to read it again. I also had reread Red Dragon and Silence while waiting for June 8th. I love it!
Rating: 
Summary: What was Mr. Harris thinking???
Review: I was so turned off by the graphic violence. I have read all of Mr. Harris's previous books and eagerly anticipated this one. I only continued reading it due to some misguided sense of duty or obsessive trait to finish what I start. There was so much he could have done with Starling and Lector's charcters. What did happen was unbelievable and out of charcter for them. Any real psychopath will tell you, it would not have ended this way. Hannibal- Every thing you always wanted to know about torture in 3 easy lessons!
Rating:
Summary: Hannibal Lecter--what a guy!
Review: I have a mixed reaction to the book. I admit I was "riveted" and read it almost straight through. I think some of the scenes are Harris at his best--most of the stuff in Italy, especially the climactic murder scene. But he really diminishes Lecter as a character of unknowable evil by providing a backstory explaining his "idiosyncracy" and by generally making him almost an avenging angel. All his major victims in this one have committed fairly major sins--the main victim in Italy was a 3-dimensional character, but his punishment was what God would exact, as imagined in medieval literature. And Mason Verger is a cartoon villian that we are supposed to feel is far more evil than Lecter. Lecter isn't really a sadist; he manipulates people into participating willingly in their own destruction. And he has far more integrity than any other major character (including Clarice, at the end). I guess it is understandable that Harris would come to embrace a character who has been such a golden goose for him.
Rating: 
Summary: This reads like a bad b-movie instead of a "Silence" sequel.
Review: Hollywood has gone to Harris' head. Gone are the cunningly crafted characters and hold-your-breath plot from "Silence of the Lambs"; in their place are caricatures and outlandishly predictable plot elements more at home in an Ed Wood film, if Ed were still alive to make movies in the 90's. Vicious, human-eating pigs. Death by electric eel. A romantic dinner of brain, frontal lobotomy al fresco while the drugged victim is still living. The plot? Oh, I'm sure it's in there somewhere. Wait a minute while I wade through three chapters on a Florentine police detective and a killer Il Monstro that has no connection whatsoever to the very thin thread of the rest of the story. Hannibal Lecter, whose genius fascinated us in "Silence of the Lambs", has gone down several notches in intelligence, with his malignant cunning cut down to a shadow of itself. His actions are completely predictable, as are those of his nemesis, a half-cannibalized pedophile who is out to revenge himself on the good doctor. The worst betrayal of all is what happens to the character of Clarice in the book's last chapters. The buzz is that this book has been optioned by Hollywood before it hit the shelves. Please, Jodie, Anthony----don't do it.
Rating:
Summary: More than a simple thriller, this is a fever dream of evil
Review: Clearly, Thomas Harris understood that having created Hanibal Lecter in "Red Dragon" and set him free at the end of "The Silence of the Lambs," something more than a simple thriller was in order for the next go-round. "Hannibal" assumes the stance of a linear narrative, but folds in upon itself and back again to create a heightened reality that has the deep red glow of a bloody fever dream. After a bright start, Clarice Starling's career is going south due to a drug raid gone terribly wrong. Lecter, with a new face is posing as a Renaissance scholar in Florence, enjoying his freedom and reveling in fascination and delight everyday people derive from an exhibit of horrific torture devices. Meanwhile, an early victim of Lecter's is plotting a revenge that involves feeding him to a bunch of specially bred flesh-eating swine. And a cop in Florence has recognized Hannibal Lecter. Oh, what to do? I won't say. But I will say this. Thomas Harris has taken the Hitchcokcian notion of shared guilt to a whole new level -- waaaay over the top, forcing the reader to make (or to avoid) moral choices that could put us in bed with evil. Yet he clearly implies that there is worse evil out there than mere mayhem. Harris forces us to face the corruption of the human spirit -- nay he rubs our faces in it. And I, for one, was glad of the facial. By the time we get to the languid, hallucinatory ending with the human version of a monkey brain feast and to the sure-to-be-debated coda we are out of breath and amazed. Many will protest the violence as overly graphic and unnecesary. They will have missed the point entirely. To quote another cannibal who sang (in the words of Stephen Sondheim): "Oh what's the sound of the world out there?/ Those crunching noises pervading the air?/ It's man devouring man, my dear/ And who are we to deny it in here?" The truths of "Hannibal" are also undeniable. There are other ways of devouring a person than eating him. Or her.
Rating:
Summary: Thank You Thomas Harris
Review: People will be disturbed by the end of this book. But, maybe we are meant to think about the nature of evil. There are plenty of bad guys in this book, and many have understandable motivations. We don't see Lecter attack anyone innocent. And what does it take to catch him?
Rating:
Summary: Drivel
Review: I agree with the earlier reviewer that Hannibal is a tangled mess of pretentious garbage. If you want to read about psychological disorders on a global scale, read the great new novel, "The Triumph and the Glory". That fine novel won't insult your intelligence like Hannibal, it even has a REAL ending, one you won't soon forget.
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