Corrupt Justice Department official Paul Krendler, who resents Starling for her success and for rejecting his sexual advances, vindictively uses the resulting scandal as a way to threaten her with suspension.

Fugitive serial killer Hannibal Lecter sends her a letter of condolence and requests more information about her personal life, offering therapeutic techniques to help her break down the trauma of the experience.

She meets with Barney, a former orderly of Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, who has kept a number of Lecter's personal belongings and medical files to sell as memorabilia.

As Lecter settles in to an opulent Maryland house he has rented under a false identity, he reflects on his childhood, specifically the death of his younger sister, Mischa.

Margot, who is infertile, tells him that she works for her brother because she needs Mason's sperm to have a child with her partner, Judy Ingram, and inherit the Verger family fortune.

At the same time, Margot releases one of the henchmen and kills another, then obtains Mason's sperm by sodomizing him with a cattle prod and murders him by shoving his pet moray eel into his mouth.

Over the course of a few days, using a regimen of psychotropic drugs, hypnosis and behavioral therapy, he attempts to help Starling heal from her childhood trauma and her pent-up anger at the injustices of the world.

Three years later, Barney, who has received a sizable bribe from Margot in exchange for his silence, is travelling the world and attends an opera at the Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires.

Lecter and Starling are seen living together in an "exquisite" Beaux Arts mansion, where they employ servants and engage in activities such as learning new languages, dancing together and building their own respective memory palaces.

Moreover, the reader is told that "Sex is a splendid structure they add to every day", that the psychoactive drugs "have had no part in their lives for a long time", and that Lecter is "satisfied" with the fact that Mischa cannot return.

Author Stephen King, a fan of the series, has said that he considers Hannibal to be better than Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs, and to be one of the two most frightening popular novels of modern times, the other being The Exorcist.