Thomas Harris has reached the treacherous writer's pinnacle: His name, on the cover, is bigger than the character who should be the book's star, Hannibal Lecter. This is a shame, because there have been few serialized villains from the past 50 years of literature worth rooting for: Highsmith's Ripley, McBain's Deaf Man, and I begin to draw a blank after that. In Red Dragon and in The Silence of the Lambs, Lecter was a gorgeously evil presence—almost supernatural, in the style of Sherlock Holmes, but with a serial-killer twist.

Here, we discover that Lecter would've been perfectly fine if it weren't for those damned Nazis, who introduced the young lad to cannibalism by eating his beloved younger sister Mischa. Giving him an origin story saps the character of his freakish appeal—the chance that he was an intelligent person who just had something tremendously wrong with the wiring of his brain. Harris, in all his 56-point-font glory, also forgets to mention those pulp-villain characteristics that make Lecter a kind of anti-Doc Savage: In previous books, Lecter has six fingers on his left hand and maroon eyes. Here, there's no mention of them, presumably to save the movie version (it came out a couple weeks ago) a fortune in special effects. The result is a lackluster writer's cannibalism of his sole claim to fame.