Cari Mora — new thriller in Hannibal Lecter’s shadow

Twenty years is a long time to wait — and every one of them was counted off impatiently by admirers of Thomas Harris, who left them in limbo after his 1999 novel Hannibal. FBI agent Clarice Starling was last seen in a bizarre relationship with the cannibalistic serial killer Hannibal Lecter, reduced to being his virtual sex slave via a mixture of drugs and hypnosis.

The prequel Hannibal Rising in 2006 didn’t address Clarice’s unsettled fate, and when it was announced that Harris was to break his silence with a new novel, readers hoped for a satisfying finis to the Lecter/Starling saga that began with The Silence of the Lambs in 1988 (itself a sequel to 1981’s Red Dragon). Now we have Cari Mora, which, to everyone’s surprise, does not feature his signature characters but an entirely new dramatis personae, including the war-damaged young heroine of the title.

Cari is living in Miami under a tenuous Temporary Protected Status as a caretaker for a mansion in which various malign individuals have an obsessive interest. Starling she isn’t, yet Cari proves to be adept at violence when she comes up against some very nasty people, one of whom is a murderous psychopath. But is Hans-Peter Schneider a worthy successor to the mesmeric Lecter?

One thing that will be immediately apparent to readers is a radical change of style — Harris has adopted an unadorned mode of writing in the Hemingway vein. What we learn about the characters largely comes through what they do — and this brief novel (just over 300 pages in a large font) has no shortage of physical action. Eschewing the complex character-building of his earlier work, Harris delivers a narrative that is absolutely cut to the bone, and while Cari is a distinctive heroine, we are not invited to care about her to the extent that we became involved with Clarice.

Millions of dollars in cartel gold has been secreted beneath the Miami Beach mansion where Cari is caretaker. Of the criminals trying to track down the booty, the unspeakable Schneider is the one who has got closest, cutting a bloody swathe through his rivals (and sacrificing his own men, one of whom is bitten in two by something with sharp teeth while on an underwater foray). As Cari becomes involved in the increasingly violent attempts to break open an enigmatic container under the house, more and more people are dispatched in gruesome fashion — mostly by Schneider.

Schneider is a camper, less nuanced villain than Lecter, but just as vile. In one memorably horrific scene, he takes a shower while watching with relish as his liquid cremation machine reduces the body of one of his victims to pulp.

Lecter, with his love of Renaissance art and haute cuisine, is a hard act to follow. Although Schneider is more than credible as a threat, one is left with the feeling that Harris is conserving his energy — Cari Mora is not as ambitious as any of the books in the author’s earlier sequence. And, Harris, we really do need to know if Clarice ever escapes from the clutches of Hannibal Lecter.

Cari Mora, by Thomas Harris, Heinemann, RRP£20, 308 pages

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