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Rating: 
Summary: A Fabulous Thriller!!!
Review: Before the movie release of Hannibal I decided to go ahead and read all the Lecter novels before the release. Lecter just appears in this novel and does not star. This is one of the finest books I've ever read. Thomas Harris gives you an absolute thrill ride. In this novel, retired FBI agent Will Graham comes out of retirement to work on a case involving a killer that kills whole families including their pets. The novel opens up with Graham at his home in Marathon Key, Florida with special agent Jack Crawford. From their the investigation starts. The killer is being dubbed the "Tooth Fairy," a name given due to the bite marks left on his victims. Meanwhile the killer calls itself "The Red Dragon," after a pcture that the killer is obsessed over. "The Red Dragon" writes to Hannibal Lecter Ph.D, and says what an idol Lecter is to him and just makes staement about Lecter's brilliance etc., etc. I won't give away any more information regarding the plot. This is a novel that takes you to the corners of the FBI and through a killer's mind. Written by one of the greatest writers ever known, Red Dragon is a novel not to be missed. I reccomend this novel to fan of a fabulous book but not to a person that cannot deal with gore and violence. Once again, READ THIS BOOK! HAPPY READING!
Rating:
Summary: unsettling
Review: Harris first rocketed up the bestseller lists with his excellent terrorism thriller Black Sunday. His antihero Hannibal the Cannibal exploded into the public consciousness after Jonathan Demme's excellent movie version of Silence of the Lambs (1991) came out, with Anthony Hopkins brilliant creepy performance as Lecter. And, of course, fans and Hollywood have had an anxious 11 year wait for Harris to finally publish a sequel. But many people may not realize that Hannibal Lecter first appeared, albeit in a cameo role, in the novel Red Dragon and in Michael Mann's capable movie version, Manhunter (1986). If you've missed this book, I urge you to try it; in many ways it is Harris's best work. FBI Special Will Graham has retired to Sugar Loaf Key, FL with his new wife Molly and her son Willie. Retired because of his nearly fatal encounter with a linoleum knife wielding Hannibal Lecter, whose capture he was responsible for, and because of the emotional troubles that have accompanied his ability to develop an almost extrasensory empathy for such killers, such that he has trouble purging their feelings from his own psyche. His peaceful idyll is disrupted when his old boss, Jack Crawford, shows up and asks for his help in catching The Tooth Fairy, a serial killer who is notorious for the tooth marks he leaves and for dicing his victims with shards of broken mirrors. Reluctantly agreeing to join the chase, Graham decides, in order to recapture the mindset that has made him so eerily effective in prior cases, to visit Hannibal Lecter in the Chesapeake State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. There the administrator, Dr. Frederick Chilton, shares an anecdote about Hannibal that demonstrates just how horrible he is: "On the afternoon of July 8, 1976, Dr. Lecter complained of chest pain. His restraints were removed in the examining room to make it easier to give him an electrocardiogram. One of his attendants left the room to smoke, and the other turned away for a second. The nurse was very quick and strong. She managed to save one of her eyes." "You may find this curious." He took a strip of EKG tape from a drawer and unrolled it on his desk. He traced the spiky line with his forefinger. "Here, he's resting on the examining table. Pulse seventy-two. Here, he grabs the nurse's head and pulls her down to him. Here, he is subdued by the attendant. He didn't resist, by the way, though the attendant dislocated his shoulder. Do you notice the strange thing? His pulse never got over eighty-five. Even when he tore out her tongue. I don't think we're any closer to understanding him than the day he came in.'' After tabloid reporter Freddie Lowndes splashes this visit all over the pages of The Tattler, the killer too contacts Lecter who urges him to attack Graham. Thus begins a suspenseful, violent minuet as Graham develops increasing insight into the killer's methodology and psychoses, the killer plans his next kill (he's on a Lunar schedule) and Hannibal pulls strings from the dark background. Harris provides fascinating detail on police procedure, he writes savvily about how the FBI uses the media and the inventiveness of the crimes he dreams up is genuinely disturbing. But the most interesting part of the story is the delicate mental balance that Graham has to maintain in order to think like the killers but still remain sane. And as Graham penetrates further into the killer's mind, Harris reveals more and more background about the Tooth Fairy, Francis Dolarhyde, who it turns out was a horribly misshapen baby, abandoned by his mother and raised by a demented grandmother, early on manifesting the now classic signs of the serial murder--torturing animals and the like. This background and Will Graham's troubles dealing with the thought patterns he shares with Dolarhyde raise questions about what separates us from such men and whether there's a formula for creating such evil beings. Is it really simply a matter of psychosexual abuse of young boys and, presto chango, you've created a serial killer? In addition to this kind of portrayal of the psychotic as victim, our effort to deal with these creatures has resulted in a sizable batch of thrillers where the serial killer is portrayed as a nearly superhuman genius. This flows from the same impulse that makes folks so willing to believe that assassinations are conspiracies. It is extremely hard, as a society, to face the fact that nondescript shlubs like David Berkowitz and Lee Harvey Oswald and Richard Speck and James Earl Ray are really capable of causing so much social disruption. Their crimes are so monumental that we want the killers to be equal in stature to the crimes. The sad truth of the matter is that these monsters are, in fact, generally hapless losers. They are not Lecterlike geniuses. That said, Hannibal is still one of the great fictional creations of recent times, our age's version of Dracula or Frankenstein, and Harris's imaginative story makes for a great, albeit unsettling, read with more food for thought than most novels of the type. GRADE: A
Rating:
Summary: Every bit as good as "Silence" & "Hannibal"
Review: Harris' consistency is really impressive. I didn't expect either "Hannibal" or "Dragon" to be as good as "Silence," but in their own ways they are. If you can, start with "Red Dragon," then read the other two ... but the books also stand alone & can be read out of sequence. There was more of Hannibal Lecter than I expected in "Dragon" (I'd heard he had virtually no role & that's not the case) ... but it turns out Lecter isn't a requirement for a good Harris novel. In this one, both the hero (Will Graham) & the primary villain (Francis Dolarhyde) are extremely well drawn. I like how Harris is willing to blur edges, which is true to life: we see a relatively nice side to Dolarhyde (some humanity shown with a date) & we see not-so-nice sides of Graham (how strongly he identifies with murderers) & this is true to real life, which lacks black & white most of the time & has more gray. Why is Graham good at what he does? Because he can relate to the villains he hunts. ... This is an excellent, thoroughly enjoyable start to a trilogy & it's basically flawless, with the exception of a couple of pages of weak dialog. ... Well worth a read & I guess if I had to rank the three it'd be 1. "Lamb," 2. "Dragon," & 3. "Hannibal," though they're all of a very close & outstanding standard. Worth the money & time.
Rating:
Summary: Excellent!
Review: If you are looking for a late night page turner, then look no further because, in this book you meet Dr. Hannibal Lector for the first time! That's right, The Silence of The Lambs is a sort of sequel to this book. I don't think this one has gotten anywhere near the credit it deserves. Read this book! It is truly scary. The characters here are well fleshed-out, not the usual hard-drinking-cop-with-three-ex-wives catches-loony-serial-killer. The FBI agent tracking the "Dragon" is a man who realizes that the only reason he has so much success, (He's the guy who caught Dr. Lector) is because he's just one flick of the switch from becoming a serial killer himself. The "Dragon" is a truly tormented soul. Harris has always been able to generate villians you can sympathize with, while you still cheer when they "get it in the end". The history of the killer drags a bit, but you are soon grabbed by the hair and yanked back into the story. Read it, and you'll end up reading it again and again
Rating: 
Summary: Predictable
Review: It starts off strongly but it eventually falls into some pretty predictable plot lines for this genre. I don't know if its because Red Dragon has inspired other books or if Harris was pulling from the same sources that the other books pulled from too.
Rating:
Summary: An overlooked creepy classic
Review: Many people have seen the movie, "Silence of the Lambs," and have read the book. But before "Silence" there was the "Red Dragon." This book is creepier, scarier and more suspenseful than the more famous "Silence." I read this book long before "Silence" and was mesmerized. It's about Will Graham, an ex-FBI agent, who is manipulated by his former FBI boss into joining the hunt for a brutal serial killer, who they call the Tooth Fairy because he bites his victims, but who calls himself the Red Dragon. Graham can reach a place in himself where he thinks and feels like serial killers. He has used his talents in the past to understand serial killer's motivations and predict their movements. He caught Hannibal the Cannibal using this ability and almost lost his life when Hannibal attacked him. He hates his "gift," it scares him because he fears there is a fine line between him and a mass murderer, and Hannibal knows it. In Hannibal's super genuis style he tortures Graham with his own terror of himself, and encourages the Red Dragon in his killing spree. The really horific part of the story, however, is that there may be a very fine line between mass muderers and us. Harris gives a truly creepy look into the mind of multiple murderer, Francis Dolarhyde. He graphically portrays Dolarhyde's brutal childhood, and not only do we sypathize, we see the logic of what he's doing. We understand why he kills, and what his killing symbolizes to him. We even feel sorry for him. For example, Dolarhyde breaks all the mirrors in the houses of his victims because he hates the sight of himself. At the same time he inserts pieces of the mirrors in the victim's eyes so they will *see* him. The sorrow and pity generated for the victims and killer is intense. It leads us to question whether we, too, could kill given the right, or wrong, set of circumstanses. Too creepy! The book also gives an interesting view into the workings of the FBI's serial crimes division. Harris describes the forensics process for hair and fiber samples, fingerprints, bite marks, and other details. And we get a fascinating glimpse of the psychological profile process. This book is not for the sqemish, the murder scenes are graphic and bloody and the story is intense. But, if you're looking for a thriller that goes deeper than the usual and has real characters, then this is the book for you. Just don't read it when you're alone at night, it will scare the pants off you!!
Rating:
Summary: Almost as good as the film
Review: Unlike most people, I read Red Dragon AFTER seeing the movie, and unlike most people, I think the film is better. The book is, however, an excellent read that lets you into the mind of an insane mass murderer. The main character is ex-FBI agent Will Graham, the man who caught Hannibal the Cannibal. He was seriously hurt in their last encounter, and quit the Bureau; now his old boss has begged him to come back. Will visits his old nemesis, Hannibal Lecter, in prison and picks his brain for clues to the identity of the "Tooth Fairy," who has brutally murdered two families. Lecter is as sly as always, however, and Will must do most of the work himself. The author has created a real demon in his Tooth Fairy, and gives us the sad reasons that caused his mental state. The story moves as fast as you can turn the pages, and the violence is graphic and horrifying. At times, the story is told in the words and thoughts of the crazed villian, and this is the creepiest and best part. A few small changes made the film even more intense, but the novel is still extremely well-written and guarranteed to make you check the locks on your doors and windows!
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