Product Description

Sexual hunger; demonic violence; sinister logic - the lethal components of a deadly formula driving a psychopath in the grip of an unimaginable 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. Special agent Will Graham has been assigned to similar cases before, cases where he was able to see and feel WITH the madmen, anticipate their moves and, most terrifying of all, be vulnerable to their horrifying brutality. Now Graham is reluctantly lured out of retirement, to find an opening to the evil mind of the Red Dragon. "Red Dragon" is quite probably the most suspenseful, utterly compelling thriller ever written.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #64874 in Books
• Published on: 1993-03-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

Review
It seems as if two out of every three suspense novels in recent years have featured psychopathic mass murderers - but Harris' contribution to the genre stands well above the pulpy crowd. Unlike Lawrence Sanders et al., Harris (Black Sunday) isn't in the vulgar titillation business; his territory is evil, not just violence - and, with unpretentious echoes of William Golding's Darkness Visible, he has written a genuinely frightening but completely un-lurid novel. . . featuring the most quietly convincing psychopath in recent American thriller fiction. The crimes are truly horrible: two whole families in far-apart suburban towns have been slaughtered one month apart - by, medical evidence shows (blood, hair, saliva), the same man. So supremely intuitive FBI-man Will Graham very reluctantly comes out of retirement (he killed someone and was himself nearly killed in recent cases), and while Graham's grim, shrewdly detailed investigation clicks along, Harris introduces us to the killer: Francis Dolarhyde of Gateway Film Laboratory in St. Louis. Facially deformed at birth, abused and abandoned as a child, Dolarhyde - now near-normal-looking thanks to plastic surgery - is a pathetic, sexually repressed, believably motivated madman: like "Son of Sam," he is driven by a demonic voice, a voice he has come to associate with a Blake watercolor that joins sex and evil in the image of a red dragon. But Harris never lays the psychopathology on too thick; the pacing remains acutely taut as Dolarhyde (who selects his victim families from the home movies he processes) plans a third monthly killing. . . but is slowly drawn out into the open by the national publicity the murders are getting. (Graham is forced to cooperate with a National Enquirer-like reporter - who becomes a doomed decoy and dies grotesquely.) And Harris even manages to make something painfully, affectingly plausible out of the oldest horror-story cliche: the monster falls in love - with a blind colleague; and his struggle not to kill her (despite orders from his voices) culminates in a marvelous scene as Dolarhyde charms his way into the Brooklyn Museum and eats that Blake watercolor. Only the novel's final twist (after Graham has tracked Dolarhyde down and witnessed his demise) is too slickly predictable; only the portrayal of Graham's worries over his own capacity for evil seems strained (with some corny lapses into Bogart-ish dialogue). Everywhere else, this is a canny yet uncontrived mixture of deduction, suspense, action, and horror - far better written than most thrillers (Harris is sometimes a fine, lean, ironic stylist), with spine-chills all the way. . . and a fundamental decency and intelligence you won't often find in this usually exploitational genre. (Kirkus Reviews)

From the Publisher
The first in the Hannibal Lecter trilogy, now a major new film. The film, Red Dragon, will be released later this year with an all-star cast including: Anthony Hopkins (Hannibal Lecter), Edward Norton (FBI Agent Will Graham), Ralph Fiennes (Francis Dolarhyde) and Harvey Keitel (Agent Crawford).

About the Author
A native of Mississippi, Thomas Harris began his career covering crime in the United States and Mexico, and was a reporter and editor for the Associated press in New York City. His first novel, Black Sunday, was published in 1975, followed by Red Dragon in 1981, Silence of the Lambs in 1988 and Hannibal in 1999.