The Silence of the Lambs

The Silence of the Lambs is a novel by the American writer Thomas Harris, first published in 1988, a sequel to his earlier novel Red Dragon and the second in his series of books featuring the imprisoned forensic psychiatrist and cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter. FBI Academy trainee Clarice Starling is sent by her supervisor, Jack Crawford, to interview Lecter in the high-security hospital where he is confined, hoping his insight into the criminal mind can help identify Buffalo Bill, an unidentified killer who abducts, starves and murders young women before skinning parts of their bodies. Lecter, intrigued by Starling and drawn into a wary exchange of personal revelations for clues, gradually helps her piece together the killer's identity as Jame Gumb, a man attempting to construct a suit of human skin out of a delusion that it will let him become a woman, information Starling uses to trace and rescue Gumb's latest captive, the senator's daughter Catherine Martin, in the novel's climax; Lecter, meanwhile, engineers his own escape from custody during a prison transfer, ending the novel at large. The book won the 1988 Bram Stoker Award for best novel and its own 1991 film adaptation went on to become only the third film in history to win all five top Academy Awards, cementing Hannibal Lecter as one of the most recognized villains in American popular fiction.