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Hannibal emerges from the nightmare on the Eastern Front, a boy in the snow, mute, with a chain around his neck.

He seems utterly alone, but he has brought his demons with him.

Hannibal's uncle, a noted painter, finds him in a Soviet orphanage and brings him to France, where Hannibal will live with his uncle and his uncle's beautiful and exotic wife, Lady Murasaki.

Lady Murasaki helps Hannibal to heal. With her help he flourishes, becoming the youngest person ever admitted to medical school in France.

But Hannibal's demons visit him and torment him. When he is old enough, he visits them in turn.

He discovers he has gifts beyond the academic, and in that epiphany, Hannibal Lecter becomes death's prodigy.

Thomas Harris has done a great job through the series of writing an otherwise very likeable and respectable man. I know I was not alone in my excitement when it was announced that Hannibal Lecter was coming to us again in print.

It was a very ambitious task for the author to try to bring him back in a prequel, but the end of Hannibal did not exactly leave much room to tack anything on the end. Without being able to append new material to the end, Harris chose to start from the beginning and show us Hannibal Lecter's childhood and what led to...well the events that occurred in Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs and Hannibal.

I appreciate the attempt and I enjoy the star of the show, but I think the project just wasn't feasible. I liked how Harris stayed consistent with writing Hannibal in a very likeable fashion; he grew up as a very cultured boy, responsible and devoted to his family and he worked harder than most at schooling. The other books could be described as "suspense" novels and Hannibal Rising attempts to follow suit.

It is very difficult to write suspense in a story where the main theme is revenge. Ok I am generalizing too much. It is very difficult to find suspense in a story about revenge where the suspense is tied to whether the main character will make it out alive...when have three books already written as concrete evidence that he escapes relatively (physically) unscathed.

The book is short and easy to breeze through; the font is large and the page margins are wide. I think the book was actually too easy to read in some regards. I never felt the hook set while I read. I kept waiting to be engaged by Hannibal Rising like I was in earlier installments of the series. If you have read it, you may think I am crazy, but I just thought there was an absence of depth in character development and the progression of some scenes. I also don't like that in some aspects Hannibal Lecter was turned into a mild action hero.

Thomas Harris is a great writer and I wish he would not keep his fan base waiting so long between books. But I believe we have now established that, if he would continue to write (and I wish he would) it may be best to retire Hannibal Lecter.

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