Rating: 
Summary: Talk about dropping the ball.....
Review: I am sure by the time you see this review you vill be very aware that something is terrible amiss with Mr. Harris. The pressure to produce must have been enormous. This was the most unsatisfactory ending I can remember ever reading. Poor Agent Starling!!!!
Rating:
Summary: I'ts No Red Dragon!
Review: I'm confused, was I reading the latest installment in the Hannibal Lector trilogy or a script from the Food Network. Even a devout foodie like me grew weary with the endless references to food, wine and Lector's "distinctive copperplate hand" There is a reason that editor's have jobs! What's more what has happened to our dear Dr. Lector; once the embodyment of evil he now seems like just another misunderstood dandy. Needless to say I was disappointed, this novel pales in comparison to Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon which I consider the finest of the three. Better luck with number four Mr. Harris.
Rating: 
Summary: Wonderfully and genuinely disturbing
Review: Well, what can I say? I bought it on the way home from work June 8 and finished it by eleven that night. I could do without the Florentine travelogue section, but by and large I felt replete. The prose has taken on a new looseness and sinuosity. The ending is a shocker with psychological infrastructure to legitimize it. It is genuinely, deliciously disturbing. Reading the bad reviews of this book make me aware of how we have changed since the 1970s, the decade from which I get my basic mindset -- there are a bunch of squeamish, political-correctness-shackled souls out there. This book may not be for them, but I am sent by it.
Rating: 
Summary: The Science of the Scams
Review: Wow, what an awful book! I've read and re-read "Red Dragon" and "Silence of the Lambs" several times, and like many other reviewers here, I'm wondering whether the author of these two wonderful novels had anything to do with the disastrous "Hannibal."To be fair, the first hundred or so pages would've been worth publishing as a novella or serialized story in, say, the New Yorker, but the rest of the book is pure trash. Hannibal and Clarice are ill-conceived caricatures of their former selves, and the childhood trauma explanation for Hannibal's perversions is truly silly. The over-the-top pornographic sadism only adds to the tawdriness, and reads like a hack writer's attempt at oneupmanship in the gross-out dimension. Obviously, Harris was pressured or otherwise felt the need to publish a third book in the trilogy, and I guess this is is revenge on his publishers, or on us. Someone should tear out the last four hundred or so pages and force him to eat them with some fava beans and a big Amarone. For God's sake don't waste a penny on this piece of junk!
Rating:
Summary: won't keep you up at night, that's for sure
Review: Finished this book last night, and it was a real disappointment. If only one hadn't had to wait 11 years for the follow up to Silence. If Harris would have been pumping out a book every two years, one could forgive him this yawn-fest. Implausable and suspenseless. Sure, some exquisite gastro-intestinal touches. But I was hoping I'd be really doing some stomach-lurching and squirming reading this novel - as it was it was a real let down. As for Stephen King's review in the NYT Book Review (whose reviews are usually very kind to begin with): don't believe the hype. King's review is way too kind and he should know better.
Rating:
Summary: Horrible
Review: Absolutely horrible. I enjoyed Red Dragon and Silence of the Lambs, but this is just Harris bringing the whole series to an end by killing off his characters. He didn't even do it well. A major disappointment.
Rating:
Summary: Forced, overly gruesome, disappointing.
Review: I looked forward to Mr. Harris' new book, but was disappointed fairly early on. Did not contain the peculiar "empathy" I found in Silence of the Lambs and Red Dragon; also seemed to depend too heavily on SOTL for support. In addition, the gruesome details and characters, I feel, overwhelmed the psychological dexterity of his previous novels.
Rating:
Summary: Fantastic
Review: Excellent. Thats all there is to say. This story was excellent, the characters were great, i find no fault for this book.
Rating: 
Summary: Not bad, but not up to the other books' caliber
Review: Harris might want to consider skipping some of his tonier reference manuals and re-reading his own work. Did anyone notice that a lot of the gore in "Hannibal" was recycled from "Red Dragon?" And after 11 years, there's really no excuse to make inaccurate reference to "Silence of the Lambs," because Frederica Bimmel was NOT a "floater," as Harris has Starling recall. She was better hidden than Buffalo Bill's other victims, a key plot point and one of the ways she tracks down Jame Gumb. In fact, Bimmel wasn't even the dead girl from the autopsy scene in "Silence." That's just sloppy. The travelogue in Florence was tedious at first, but I got into it more as time went on. I don't think we should have revisited every "Silence" character, though. I did like the risk he took by explaining Hannibal's past -- it made him a bit less cartoonishly evil. And I did like the ending.
Rating:
Summary: A Pleasing Style, well paced story...strange ending
Review: I enjoyed the style of writing in Hannibal by Thomas Harris; though it took some pages to get used to. I don't want cookie cutter novels; always the complete sentence, always in the proper tense, always in one pov. It was a delight to see Harris write in this "fresh" style, and I do believe he has earned the right to offer us this style. As for the story, it was well-paced and very enjoyable. I didn't think the scenes were overly described...I needed it to get a feel of the atmosphere. Nor did I think it was too gruesome, for it helped in defining the characters and the degree of their motivation...every character was fascinating. The ending...though strange to me, is one that I have accepted. p.s. Anthony Hopkins brilliant portrayal of Hannibal had me reading and re-reading all of Hannibal's diaglogue, until I could hear him as Hopkin's would have portrayed him.
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