The silence of the lambs

Thomas Harris will seize you with an emotion more profound than terror.

Of his previous novel, Stephen King wrote, "The book simply comes at you and comes at you, finally leaving you shaken and sober and afraid on a deeper level than simple 'thrills' alone furnish." Harris' new book is his most powerful and provocative, a novel with an impact unlike any other.

The time is now. A serial murderer known only by a grotesquely apt nickname - Buffalo Bill - is stalking particular women. He has a purpose, but no one can fathom it, for the bodies are discovered in different states. Clarice Starling, a young trainee at the F.B.I. Academy, is surprised to be summoned by Jack Crawford, Chief of the Bureau's Behavioral Science section. Her assignment: to interview Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a brilliant psychiatrist and grisly killer now kept under close watch in the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane. Lecter's insight into the minds of murders could help track and capture Buffalo Bill.

Smart and attractive, Starling is shaken to find herself in a strange, intense relationship with the acutely perceptive Lecter. His cryptic clues - about Buffalo Bill and about her - launch Clarice on a search that every reader will find starling, harrowing, and totally compelling.

The Silence of the Lambs is an ingenious, masterfully written novel that will be the most talked-about best-seller of the year.