Seven years since FBI Special Agent Clarice Starling interviewed him in a maximum security hospital for the criminally insane. The doctor is still at large, but Starling has never forgotten her encounters with Dr Lecter, and the metallic rasp of his seldom-used voice still sounds in her dreams...

Sexual hunger; demonic violence; sinister logic - the lethal components of a deadly formula driving a psychopath in the grip of an unimagin-able delusion; a boastful killer who sends the police tormenting notes; a tortured, torturing monster who finds ultimate pleasure in viciously murdering happy families, and calls himself... The Red Dragon.

There, Hannibal lives with his uncle and his uncle's beautiful and exotic wife, Lady Murasaki, who helps him to heal - and flourish. But Hannibal's demons are not so easily defeated.

An FBI trainee. A psychopath locked up for unspeakable crimes. And a serial killer getting ever closer to his latest victim... FBI rookie Clarice Starling turns to Dr Hannibal Lecter, monster cannibal held in a hospital for the criminally insane, for insight into the deadly madman she must find.