copyright 1988; St. Martin's Press, New York; hardbound; very good condition with unmarked, clean pages; original owner sticker inside front; dust jacket very good.
description -
The Silence of the Lambs is a psychological horror novel by Thomas Harris. First published in 1988, it is the sequel to Harris's 1981 novel Red Dragon. Both novels feature the cannibalistic serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter, this time pitted against FBI Special Agent Clarice Starling. Its film adaptation directed by Jonathan Demme was released in 1991 to widespread critical acclaim and box office success.
Plot -
Clarice Starling, a young FBI trainee, is asked to carry out an errand by Jack Crawford, the head of the FBI division that draws up psychological profiles of serial killers. Starling is to present a questionnaire to the brilliant forensic psychiatrist and cannibalistic serial killer, Hannibal Lecter. Lecter is serving nine consecutive life sentences in a Maryland mental institution for a series of murders.
Crawford's real intention, however, is to try to solicit Lecter's assistance in the hunt for a serial killer dubbed "Buffalo Bill", whose modus operandi involves kidnapping overweight women, starving them for up to two weeks, killing and skinning them, and dumping the remains in nearby rivers. The nickname was started by Kansas City Homicide, as a sick joke that "he likes to skin his humps." Throughout the investigation, Starling periodically returns to Lecter in search of information, and the two form a strange relationship in which he offers her cryptic clues in return for information about her troubled and bleak childhood as an orphan.
When Bill's sixth victim is found in West Virginia, Starling helps Crawford perform the autopsy. Starling finds a pupa in the throat of the victim, and just as Lecter predicted, she has been scalped. Triangular patches of skin have also been taken from her shoulders. Furthermore, autopsy reports indicate that Bill had killed her within four days of her capture, much faster than his earlier victims. Starling takes the pupa to the Smithsonian, where it is initially identified as the black witch moth, a species that does not naturally occur where the victim was found,[1] though later it is identified as the Death's-head Moth, an even more exotic species that would have to be reared in captivity from imported eggs.
On the basis of Lecter's prediction, Starling believes that he knows who Buffalo Bill really is...