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Poor old Thomas Harris ... he had backed himself into a corner with the Silence of the Lambs.

Red Dragon was the best piece of popular fiction I think I ever read. Silence was an outstanding book. But setting Hannibal Lecter free sounded the death knell for the formula which made both of those books so successful.

And no bad thing either. Just like Hitchcock with Psycho, Harris opened the floodgates for thousands of inferior copies. How many times do you read about a character which 'makes Hannibal Lecter look like Old Mother Hubbard'?

Those police procedurals with a flawed hero facing an omnipotent character, the embodiment of evil, should be put to bed now. Thomas Harris, who never really wrote to that forumula anyway, has done his best to aid this noble cause and has brought us an entirely logical end to the Lecter story.

By bringing Lecter out into the open, Harris immediately lost the fear of the unknown which added an extra pinch of spice to the central plot in the first two books. And to his credit he did not try to regain that element - instead he gave us an entirely logical story.

It's a simple story, it has to be, there are no really diverting sub plots avilable. Instead it concentrates on the search for the man by a number of protagonists. I am not going to delve into the plot further - that is for the reader to do.

I will merely say the ending took my breath away. It was so RIGHT. And to all the hypocrites who beat their pained breast at the 'depravity' of this story - Red Dragon brought us depravity and made it sexy; Silence took that sexiness to a new level; there are no redeeming qualities to either of these books, other than the fact that they are works of fiction, designed purely to horrify. To praise those two and condemn this hints at an inability to separate the relevant issues from society's current general attitude to violence.

My only quibble? The typos!

I finished "Hannibal" early this morning. It left me feeling like I'd been CHEATED! This book is a completely inadequate addition to the sometimes brilliant always extremely engrossing books Mr. Harris has written to date. It leaves me with the feeling that it was ghost-written at the behest of some publishing executive who was solely interested in book sales and movie rights.

Now for my reasons. In "The Red Dragon", Mr. Harris created a serial killer so rich in detail I was brought to tears when it was explained how this person became a monster. We are also introduced to Jack Crawford, Will Graham and the great Hannibal Lector. Mr. Harris continued his tour de force with "Silence of the Lambs" where we are introduced to Clarice Starling and Paul Krendler while the brilliant and courageous Will Graham is dismissed as being an alcoholic with a scarred face living in seclusion in Florida.

Now to Hannibal. This time Crawford is the great character dumped on the scrap pile. After the brilliant start in her career, Harris expects us to believe that Krendler has cleverly orchestrated Clarice's career so that she's relegated minor assignments. On the other hand Krendler is so obviously a jerk, you'd think anyone with the brains of an amoeba could see what he's up to.

All the "career-threatening" trouble Clarice has with the FBI could have handled easily by a second-year law student.

The explanations of Hannibal's behavior are weak and unconvincing. Harris would have done a lot better to leave them out. Harris also expects us to believe that one of the most infamous criminals in history can hide while living in high-style. (Josef Mengele couldn't pull that off.)

Of course Clarice finds him with ridiculous ease.

I could go on here, but I'll finish now. "Hannibal" is little more than your basic off-the-shelf thriller. The kind of book you read on a flight ot Tokyo and leave on the seat for the next passenger.

It is not worthy of Thomas Harris,not worth the seven year wait and definitely not worth the price. Wait for the paperback version you'll find at your local laundromat.

The ending of this book is so implausible that it effectively ruins the book. (I am about to write about the ending, so if you don't want to know about it, don't read further.) Agent Starling's transformation at the end was completely out of character, and an insult to readers who had read the previous 500 pages. She is changed from being an independent, moral and law-abiding FBI agent to an amoral cannibal who without the slightest hesitation eats the brains of a fellow FBI agent, and then seduces her sociopathic captor and enters a long-term relationship with him.

One of the things I appreciated about Silence of the Lambs was the psychological sophistication of the plot. And what I dislike so much about this book is that the author, for some reason, goes to the opposite extreme and creates an ending -- presumably for shock value -- which is not supported by anything that precedes it. As a professional writer who is capable of better work, Harris should be ashamed of this book.