Hannibal

Hannibal is a novel by American author Thomas Harris, published in 1999. It is the third in his series featuring Dr Hannibal Lecter and the second to feature FBI Special Agent Clarice Starling, and it follows The Silence of the Lambs as a sequel.

The plot is set seven years after the earlier book and deals with the intended revenge of someone Lecter has harmed, which shifts the series from the investigation of a killer to the consequences of one. Lecter is a cannibalistic former forensic psychiatrist who, after his imprisonment, had been consulted by FBI agents in earlier novels, and by this point in the sequence he is living outside custody.

In the wider series, Lecter first appeared as a minor villain in Red Dragon in 1981, took a larger role in The Silence of the Lambs in 1988, and was played by Anthony Hopkins in the 1991 adaptation of that novel and again in the 2001 film made from this book. The novels are usually read as psychological thrillers rather than as horror in the genre sense, but the label is commonly applied to them as well.