Hannibal recap

Years after she killed Buffalo Bill, FBI agent Clarice Starling's career has stalled, and a deadly botched raid makes her a scapegoat. At the same time Hannibal Lecter, long a fugitive, is living in Florence under a false name. Mason Verger, Lecter's sole surviving victim, a rich, disfigured invalid, has spent a fortune plotting to capture Lecter and feed him to wild boars, and he uses his corrupt allies to dangle Starling as bait. An Italian policeman recognizes Lecter and tries to sell him to Verger, and Lecter kills him and returns to America. Drawn back toward Starling, Lecter is finally seized by Verger's men, and Starling, going rogue to save him, is wounded in the attempt. Verger is killed by his abused sister Margot, and Lecter escapes with the injured Starling. Rather than being rescued back to her old life, Starling, after weeks in Lecter's care and under his influence, becomes his willing companion. Lecter kills her chief tormentor in the Bureau, and the two vanish together to live abroad.

Previously in this series: the cannibalistic psychiatrist Hannibal Lecter was captured years ago by the investigator Will Graham and confined to a maximum-security hospital, from which he later engineered a bloody escape and vanished. In the previous book, the young FBI trainee Clarice Starling was sent to seek Lecter's insight while hunting a serial killer nicknamed Buffalo Bill, who abducted women to make a garment from their skin. Trading pieces of her own painful history for Lecter's cryptic guidance, Starling eventually traced the killer on her own, shot him dead in his cellar, and rescued his last captive, the daughter of a senator. That success made her name, but Lecter escaped during the same case and remains at large, living free under a false identity abroad, and he has never lost his fascination with Starling. This book opens with him still a fugitive and her a serving agent whose star has since fallen.

Hannibal Lecter is captured by Mason Verger's men and prepared for the revenge Verger has planned, to be devoured alive by specially bred wild boars. Clarice Starling, having defied the Bureau to track him down, storms the Verger estate to stop it and is badly wounded in the rescue. Verger himself is killed by his long-abused sister Margot, who has her own reasons to want him dead, and Lecter allows the blame to fall where it will. Lecter escapes, taking the injured Starling with him, and nurses her back to health at a hideaway. Over the following weeks he works on her mind, and the story reaches its notorious close: Starling is neither killed nor restored to her former self, but instead accepts a place at Lecter's side. At a formal dinner Lecter kills Paul Krendler, the corrupt official who ruined her career, and serves part of him at the table. Rather than turning on Lecter, Starling remains with him as an equal and a lover, and the two disappear together, later living as a wealthy, cultured couple in South America, beyond the reach of the law.