Author: Thomas Harris
Book #3 of Series: Hannibal Lecter
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Published year: 1999


In the third novel, 1999's Hannibal, Lecter lives in a palazzo in Florence, Italy, and works as a museum curator under the alias "Dr. Fell". The novel reveals that one of Lecter's victims survived: Mason Verger, a wealthy, sadistic pedophile whom Lecter had drugged, paralyzed and persuaded to mutilate his own face during a therapy session. Verger offers a huge reward for anyone who apprehends Lecter, whom he intends to feed to feral pigs specially bred for the purpose. Verger enlists the help of Rinaldo Pazzi, a disgraced Italian police inspector, and Paul Krendler, a corrupt Justice Department official and Starling's boss. Lecter kills Pazzi and returns to the United States to escape Verger's Sardinian henchmen, only to be captured. Starling follows them, intent on apprehending Lecter personally, and is injured in a gunfight with Verger's henchmen: Lecter escapes, rescues the wounded Starling and takes her to his rented lake house to treat her, subjecting her to a regimen of mind-altering drugs and classical conditioning in the process. One evening, he invites her to a formal dinner where Krendler is the guest and first course. Lecter's plan to brainwash Starling ultimately fails; instead, the two become lovers and disappear together, only to be sighted again three years later entering the Teatro Colón opera house in Buenos Aires by former orderly Barney Matthews, who had befriended and respected Lecter while he was incarcerated in Baltimore. Fearing for his life, Barney leaves Buenos Aires immediately, never to return.