Rating: 
Summary: Exciting right up to the final fizzle.
Review: I enjoyed Red Dragon & Silence of the Lambs, which stand as classics of the genre. This one starts off about how and where you'd expect, with Hannibal on the run and Clarisse in some career difficulty. The book reads well, with plot twists and character development in the B+ range. HOWEVER: BEWARE OF THE ENDING. Shockingly out of character, jarringly out of context, it could enrage you as it did yours truly. The last 20 or so pages made me ask myself: "For *THIS* I spent money !?!!!?" Caveat Emptor, folks, this one turns into a huge dog.
Rating: 
Summary: Harris gives us another gourmet taste of Hannibal Lecter
Review: Thomas Harris' third novel featuring Dr. Hannibal "The Cannibal" Lecter once again relegates him to the role of supporting character. However, sating the reader's appetites for the charming anti-hero of these novels, Harris has wisely made him the focus of the FBI investigators.Clarice Starling is back as the central investigator, but rather than a student investigator, she is a trained field operative whose career has been subject to the whims of the higher ups in the government. Also returning are Jack Crawford and Paul Kandler as two of Starling's bosses. Add to the plot the character of Mason Vergers, Lecter's sixth victim, and the only one to survive, whose taste for vengeance compells him to issue an enormous bounty for Dr. Lecter - alive or dead. HANNIBAL is a great adventure. I read it through in one 16 hour sweep. While on some levels it lacks the psychological intensity of the former novels, it does focus on Lecter's background, his relationship with his sister, and his need for family. It continues to develop Starling's psychological profile, including her relationship with her father and with Ardelia Mapp, another FBI agent. Several times throughout the novel, Harris satirizes the American taste for breaking news, and often has the arrival of the media timed with the arrival of FBI on a crime scene. He also allows the Clinton/Lewinsky scandal to play in the background and sets HANNIBAL in a specific time and place. Rumors abound that the movie rights were sold for $10 million - the top price ever paid for a novel. With Anthony Hopkins and Jodie Foster bigger names and stars now than when SILENCE OF THE LAMBS was filmed, the price tag for this movie will reach halfway to $100 million dollars before a foot of film is shot. But it will be made into a film, and we will eagerly await its scrumptious film release.
Rating: 
Summary: The Hannibal Lecter Legacy of Evil
Review: After reading Red Dragon, there is no reason to believe that Harris' next book will not follow suit. You MUST read Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs first though!
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: The Price of Million-dollar Book Contracts
Review: Usually, I make so many words dance on the page to lure the uninitiated and show off how smart I have become after reading a certain book. Not this one. After coming through the very incandescent though, at times, unstable plot of Red Dragon, I am rather disappointed with this his latest book. Thomas Harris in his haste for a million-dollar book contract managed to prostitute his capable mind and doused our mounting excitement with dismay. Hannibal is too campy for my taste. I hope Mr. Harris recovers from this as I really believe he is a very talented writer in this genre. But everything is not total disappointment. The Harris seal is still there but not too evident as in his previous books. Three stars. No quibbling about that.
Rating:
Summary: A Great Read!!!!
Review: Although this book has a totally different tone than the earlier ones of this series, it is hauntingly creepy and poignant.
Rating:
Summary: Real To Life?
Review: This Book Is A Great Wind-Up for the series! And to think! It does and can happen! That's really hard for the Civilized World to fully take in. If you go into history or simply look into today's world, these things do happen. The book holds your attention in a very intense way. Only for the strong!
Rating:
Summary: I enjoyed the book..hated the ending
Review: I thoroughly enjoyed RED DRAGON and SILENCE OF THE LAMBS. I read Hannibal with equally high hopes. I did not hate the book. However, the ending was disturbingly horrid. ***SPOILER*** Clarice would never in a million years run off with Dr. Lector. EVER. It was completely out of character. It's like saying Hugh Hefner decided to become homosexual.
Rating:
Summary: Hannibal is Harris's Misunderstood Masterpiece
Review: Hannibal continues the stories of the cannibalistic Dr. Hannibal Lecter and Clarice Starling, the FBI agent who was so fascinated by him in Silence of the Lambs.
The plot itself is suspenseful, though perhaps not quite as gripping as the hunt for serial killer Jame Gumb in Silence. Hannibal's villain, Mason Verger - a former victim of Lecter's - at times descends into unbelievable campiness. Harris seems to have written parts of the book with tongue firmly in cheek, which can make it hard for the reader to decide whether to laugh or grimace. But perhaps this was intentional.
The fact that it is the murderous Lecter rather than some poor innocent who is Verger's intended victim makes it hard for the reader to pick a side - and this definitely IS intentional.
The book's implicitly religious nature has been missed by many (though by no means all) readers and reviewers. Lecter's seemingly monstrous behavior makes perfect sense from one point of view, as those familiar with Dostoyevsky, Nietzsche, and O'Connor might agree. If God does not exist, all things are possible. So why not cannibalism? It would be interesting to hear utilitarian ethicist Peter Singer's take on this. In the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, Calvin once suggested as a class discussion the proposal that cannibalism should call for more lenient sentencing in murder cases, on the grounds that it is less wasteful.
Homoeroticism is another prominent theme in Hannibal, with the terribly disfigured Verger being obsessed with Mann's tale of obsession itself, Death in Venice. Of course, the portrayal of Gumb in Silence had drawn criticism from homosexual groups, and the homosexual overtones of Lecter's cannibalism are obvious through the three Lecter books.
The gross-out factor of the book is high, as is the interest level. The reader finds himself simultaneously wanting to find out what happens next and just wanting it to be over.
Is it a perfect book? No. The origin of Lecter's cannibalism is presented in a manner a little too facile and straightforward, and seems almost designed to gain the reader's sympathy for Lecter.
The one element of the book which has stirred up the most controversy is the culmination of the Starling-Lecter relationship. It was a secret hidden in plain view in Silence that above all else that she was, Clarice Starling was a woman fascinated by Hannibal Lecter. That the long-foreshadowed ending came as a surprise to anyone shows simply that some people were not paying close enough attention.
Harris is not a first-order writer whose narration is meant to be infallible or 100% trustworthy. Although the readers were sometimes TOLD how bright and dedicated and together Starling was, what were we actually SHOWN was a woman who was very impressed by, respectful of, and deferential to a cannibalistic serial killer. The wise reader judged her by her actions, not by the thumbnail sketch of her given in the narration.
Starling is in fact closely akin to those pathetic creatures who send fan mail and marriage proposals to butchers such as Ted Bundy. She is a serial killer groupie. This much was made apparent in Silence, so Hannibal cannot properly be seen as a betrayal of the "real" Starling of Silence. There always was only ONE Starling: the one who was captivated by Hannibal Lecter from the very beginning.
Actress Jodie Foster (who played Starling in the movie version of Silence), is one of those who entirely missed the point of Starling in her prior appearance. She refused to reprise the role in the movie version of this book. With no apparent sense of the hideous irony involved, she announced her plans to instead go ahead with her production of a fawning biopic of Nazi propagandist Leni Riefenstahl, of whom Foster was quoted on the British Film Institute's website as saying: "She is really one of the great stories of the Twentieth century and a moral tale for all of us. She is an extraordinary woman - sharp as a tack and as beautiful as she ever was with a tremendous body."
No matter how revolting the actions of Lecter and Verger (and perhaps Starling) are, those people are entirely fictional.
But the reader should be warned: fictional though it is, the gore factor in Hannibal is high. I found it worse than Silence in that respect (though no worse than Red Dragon), so if Silence represented a limit for you, it might be best to avoid Hannibal.
But if you can stomach (sorry) the butchery, the story is well worth the read. Harris always leaves his readers wanting more. In his place, many other authors would be on book 16 of their "cannibal / killer / psychologist / detective / hero" Lecter series by now, and the character would be completely forgettable. By providing only the necessary beginning, middle, and end of the Lecter story, Harris has guaranteed his creation a lasting place in suspense fiction.
Rating: 
Summary: Ugh. A sorry sequel to the brilliant "Lambs"
Review: I read "Silence of the Lambs" and for horror-mystery, I have to say, it's unsurpassed. The popular film was an excellent rendition of the book--a rare thing in fiction, but the book provided deeper insight into Hannibal, possibly the worst person on earth, according to the creative lights of Thomas Harris.
I was sorry, sorry, sorry I read "Hannibal." In fact, if they actually made that little penlight device from "Men in Black" that could erase your memory, I'd be ordering one from Amazon.com right now.
The end of the book, where Hannibal is co-opting Clarice is no surprise; this was foreshadowed even in "Silence." The hunter and hunted have a deep relationship, and this is the dance of protagonist-antagonist that makes crime-horror so interesting to read. But the outcome was so unbelievable as to make the book ridiculous. I don't believe Clarice would have behaved as she did. In addition, this book was gross to the extreme; just because you can conceive of an idea doesn't mean it's a good idea to put it into print. My goodness, Mr. Harris has an awful mind and I hope never to meet him in person. To me, he makes the Marquis de Sade look like a Sunday School teacher.
If you love gross horror and shock, this snuff-film of a novel will please you. But...not me.
Blech.
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