History and Mystery Reads

Rating: 8/10

• Plot: A retired FBI profiler is drawn back to hunt a killer who murders whole families, and consults the brilliant cannibal he once caught.
• Clues: Forensic and psychological, from bite marks to home movies.
• Reveal: Tense and frightening, with a late twist that tests the hero.
• Science bonus: Bite-mark analysis, latent prints and the painstaking study of home-movie film are shown as the real engines of the hunt, alongside Graham’s intuition.

Will Graham left the FBI after being badly wounded while catching Dr Hannibal Lecter. Jack Crawford persuades him to return to help identify a killer the press calls the Tooth Fairy, who murders families in their homes at the full moon. Graham’s gift is his ability to think like the killer, and that gift is also his torment.

Thomas Harris alternates Graham’s investigation with the point of view of the killer, Francis Dolarhyde, a disfigured, abused man obsessed with William Blake’s painting of the Great Red Dragon. Dolarhyde’s relationship with a blind woman, Reba McClane, gives the book an unexpected tenderness.

Lecter appears in only a few scenes, but he dominates them. His conversations with Graham are chilling, and his attempt to interfere with the investigation adds menace.

The book’s forensic detail was groundbreaking, and its portrait of profiling influenced both fiction and public perception of the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit.

The weaknesses are some melodramatic passages and a tendency to explain the killer’s psychology too neatly. The violence is disturbing.

The 8 reflects a masterful thriller that established the modern serial-killer novel. It was filmed twice, as Manhunter in 1986 and as Red Dragon in 2002.