**Spoilers inside**Book number two on my list was The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris. Considering the movie is one of my top 10 faves, I'm surprised it took me this long to read it. This is the 2nd book in the Hannibal Lechter series, the first being Red Dragon which I read a couple years ago.
I was really surprised at how closely the movie stayed to the book, obviously with the amount of detail you can only ever be so close but this one is pretty good.
For those not familiar, the Silence of the Lambs introduces us to a young FBI agent named Clarice Starling. She is pulled into a case involving a serial killer that skins his victims, and to find him she must enlist the help of sociopath (and cannibal) Dr. Hannibal Lechter. In the time Clarice spends with Dr. Lechter he gets inside her head and forces her to face things buried deep in her memory. In the end Clarice ends up catching Buffalo Bill, and Dr. Lechter escapes imprisonment due to the greed and ignorance of the "Doctor" in charge of him. At the end of the book we see Starling graduating the Academy, and Lechter enjoying his new found freedom after being locked in a cell for fifteen years. "Have the lambs stopped screaming yet Clarice?"
Book number 3 for me was Hannibal, also the third book in this series. This one finds our characters Clarice and Dr. Lechter 7 years after the Silence of the Lambs. Clarice falls from grace in the FBI when a drug bust goes terribly wrong, and Lechter is enjoying his freedom in Florence Italy acting as a curator in a museum. This book introduces us to one of Lechter's victims that actually survived- Mason Verger. When I first started reading Mason was the reason I almost didn't continue, he was disturbing. His obsession with revenging the mutilation done to him by Lechter involves man eating pigs and is a little out there. His sister Margot was who I was rooting for the whole time. In several twists and turns Lechter and Clarice reunite, Mason and a few other unfortunate human beings get what's coming to them, and the story ends much better then it did in the movie (at least in my opinion). Clarice humanizes Lechter, and it's just interesting to see how they pull things no one else can out of one another. This book is also the first glimpse of Lechter's past and the grizzly death of his sister Misha.
There is a fourth and final book "Hannibal Rising" which I have and do intend on reading. I think I need some lighter reading for a while though. As in to these books as I find myself, I also have trouble sleeping if I'm reading before bed. Some light, frothy reading is certainly on my horizon. All in all two very interesting reads that suck you in from page 1 and kind of make you question yourself when you see that the "Bad" guy isn't at all the worst person out there.
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