Clarice Starling is a young FBI trainee, sharp and ambitious, when she is handed an unsettling assignment: interview Dr. Hannibal Lecter, the brilliant psychiatrist and cannibal locked away in a Baltimore asylum. The Bureau wants Lecter's insight into an active case — a killer known as "Buffalo Bill," who abducts young women and skins them. Lecter agrees to help, but only in exchange for a currency Starling can barely afford: the private memories of her own childhood.
As a senator's daughter becomes Buffalo Bill's latest captive and a clock begins to run, Starling is drawn deeper into a game of quid pro quo with Lecter, trading pieces of herself for the clues that might save a life. What emerges is one of the great psychological duels in modern fiction — a contest of intellect and vulnerability between an unproven agent and the most seductive monster in crime literature.
Winner of every major thriller and horror award and the basis for the Academy Award-winning film, Thomas Harris's The Silence of the Lambs is a masterwork of suspense: precise, terrifying, and unexpectedly humane in its portrait of a woman determined to prove herself in a world that keeps underestimating her.
