Krishna
This is my first book by this author, most famous for the Silence of the Lambs, which is the second book in this very series. It shows why varying your authors can give you a totally different experience as this book, which is excellent, has a completely different vibe and style from other authors who write horror thrillers (killers, not supernatural).
Jack Crawford comes to interview the now retired detective Will Harris. His agenda is really to ask for help but Will’s wife Molly hates it because he was injured in the previous case, grievously. But Will cannot decline. Molly makes Jack promise that his work would be behind the scenes and he will not be exposed to any danger.
Will goes to the house where the family was killed – still locked up and a crime scene – and imagines how it would have happened. The father killed first, the kids, next and the wife last. (Based on forensic reports that he had read already).
The police get a lead from a nosy neighbour who had seen a blond man wearing a cap reading a meter and they think that it may be the killer’s disguise.
This is the first book in the series but Will has already met and caught the famous Dr Hannibal Lector. Will decides to reach out to Dr Hannibal Lector (made famous by the memorable portrayal by Anthony Hopkins in the movie The Silence of the Lambs) for help.
Lector is scary enough here in this book; a highly accomplished, polished, psychologist who can transform into a monster in seconds. A man whom the prison psychologists and psychiatrists even struggle to classify; a man of wide interests and cultured one moment; a man who has done unspeakable things in other moments. Really a brilliant portrayal. Since he can switch from one to the other in seconds, he is treated with extreme caution as a very dangerous criminal by the prison authorities.
Lector appears to be sleeping when Bill sees him (from outside the iron bars) but he surprises him by talking to him immediately.
When Graham leaves, Dr Lector uses his wiles and his right to a phone call to get a connecting phone number for Bill (not his house number, but still.)
The scene shifts to Francis Dolarhyde, a photographer living alone in a sprawling house. We realize that he is the killer when he watches the home movie recording of the Leeds killing.
Meanwhile Bill goes to see the other victim’s house – The Jacobis. By soaking up the atmosphere, he can see things that others missed. He realizes that after killing the cat, the killer ‘is likely’ to have watched it hidden and finds the tree branch from which he could have likely observed the cat funeral by the kids. He also finds a discarded tab of a pop can.
Dolarhyde reads in the paper that Will the great detective investigating Tooth Fairy, has gone to get help from the infamous Doctor Lector.
He writes a note in a toilet paper to Lector. The note is found (minus the contact information) by a maid cleaning his cell when Lector has been taken out. In just an hour, they get it over to the lab to fingerprint and analysis and keep it back before Lector suspects.
However, by the time the response for Lector is given (in code) and the police crack the code, it is realized that Graham’s wife and son are being targeted. The police move them to a safehouse.
Now Graham realizes that until the Tooth Fairy is caught, he and his family will not be safe. So they lay an elaborate trap. They get hold of a slimy reported in Tattler called Lourdes and lets him print pieces suggesting the Tooth Fairy has low self esteem, may have gay tendencies etc, hoping that it will infuriate him to be careless. Lourdes himself is dreaming of exclusive book deal and fame right after the killer is caught.
The police then strongly suggest that Graham is working out of a particular building and put up tight surveillance around it.
The ploy works but in an unfortunate direction. Lourdes is ambushed by Dolarhyde and tortured. You know that Robert Harris has the talent for brutally honest, gruesome descriptions which made Hannibal Lector so frightening Here Dolarhyde starts with biting off Lourdes’ lips and spitting them (wearing dental tools to assist).
The end of Lourds at the hands of ‘The Red Dragon’ as Dolarhyde likes to name himself is even more gruesome. By the time Graham goes to see him, he is unable to say much and dies in front of Graham.
Robert Harris has a knack of upping the terror and violence to levels not seen in many of his contemporaries. He does not describe the gore in exquisite detail like others but when a sudden violence happens, like Lourdes, it is shocking even when you expect violence in a story like this.
The author goes in a flashback to the childhood of Dolarhyde. His birth with a cleft palette, his mothers revulsion and his abandonment in an orphanage; her lies to her disapproving mother (the imperious but impecunious lady only known as Grandmother or Mrs Dolarhyde) that the child was born dead.
When the grandmother finds out, she takes him into her wing but to make ends meet, is forced to take old people for boarding. And another nightmare begins for Francis, the grandmother’s over strict disciplining and disapproval of everything he did. He slowly develops a taste for killing – chickens first, and then larger animals. When his mother marries and moves away, she does not want anything to do with her mother, especially since the Grandmother deliberately sabotaged the political ambitions of her new husband out of spite for abandoning and then lying about Francis.
But when Grandmother gets serious psychiatric issues, she is forced to commit Grandmother to an asylum and take Francis into her home. Francis is extremely uncomfortable with his mother Mariam’s new family of step brothers, step sisters and step father – and even his mother.
He goes to the lab to get some infrared film – a requirement for his next murder that he has planned but on the pretext of giving it to a zoo to film nocturnal animals. He meets Reba McClune, who is blind and so cannot see his deformity. He gives her a ride to her house when her car pool partner ditched her and she comes very close to danger, without realizing it.
He forms a friendship with Reba, who kind of seduces him. But his infatuation is nipped in the bud by the inner voice ‘of the dragon’ which forces him to be rid of Reba before the next victim. He is bullied into submission and is in abject terror in front of ‘the Dragon’.
He struggles against his inner demon (‘the dragon’) and desperately wants to save Reba. So he goes to the museum and ‘eats’ the original dragon painting which can now no longer harm him. His struggles are very interesting to read. When Reba tells him that she wants to ‘remain friends’ something breaks in him. He kills Reba’s boyfriend Marc in front of her house, chloroforms her and takes her to his house. In a final act of consideration, he decides not to do what he did to the other victims.
In the meanwhile Graham gets very close to the truth. He figures out the link that all of them have films in the house and so he thinks of the photo studio as the link. He already has a set of fingerprints from Lourdes murder (but no match yet) and tracks down even the photo studio where the films came from.
Just as Reba was being taken unconscious to the house of Francis, he zooms in on the most likely suspect while he examines Dolarhyde’s office!
The book ends shortly thereafter but I will leave this out for you to find out if you read the book. The plot is excellent. The storytelling is very effective and shocking! It is a thrilling read, if a bit gory in its descriptions. The tortured soul of Graham and his genius comes across nicely.
And one thing : The book has a nice twist right up to the end.
Very satisfying and well worth the effort spent on it.
8/10
— Krishna