A Book to Sink Your Teeth Into

Brian Raftery's investigation of the serial killer, cannibal, gourmand, and pop cultural icon Hannibal Lecter is a very good book that sounds as if it should be a very bad one. When I first heard that Raftery, a respected entertainment journalist, was writing what purported to be a biography of Lecter, I both groaned and wondered about copyright law. After all, Lecter's creator Thomas Harris is still alive, and the four novels he has written that feature the character—Red Dragon, The Silence of the Lambs, Hannibal, and Hannibal Rising—remain perennially popular, selling tens of thousands of copies a year in the United States alone. Was Hannibal Lecter: A Life going to be some accursed piece of fan fiction, unaccountably published by a major house and leading the opportunistic Raftery to deserve a visit from a hungry, understandably aggrieved Dr. Lecter some dark and stormy night?

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