Ah, the classic crime thriller. If you've seen the movie The Silence of the Lambs then you know the story. The movie follows the novel religiously, leaving out only a couple of unimportant subplots. In most ways the movie outshines the novel. The novel itself is rather poorly written in several areas, because in those scenes Harris essentially eschews the art of writing a story for the art of writing a screenplay. These sections of the books occur at the most critical action sequences, where Harris apparently feels the need to script the action so we envision it exactly as he sees it in his own mind. The play-by-play of the script translates well to the big screen but is clumsy on paper.

Overall a good book and an exceptional movie.