Book summary

As a boy in Eastern Europe, the son of a wealthy viscount, Hannibal Lecter showed few signs of the monstrous life he would be destined to live. But at the end of World War II, German soldiers killed his parents and kept Hannibal and his sister Mischa to be used as food in the long cold winter. Hannibal survived, but Mischa did not. After being discovered in the snow unconscious with a chain around his neck, Hannibal was taken in by his uncle and his lovely Asian wife, and soon became a student at medical school, where he excelled. However, the twisted underpinnings of his life never truly left him, and a desire for revenge grew in his heart--his childhood tormentors had not seen the last of Hannibal Lecter. Fiction's most famous cannibal and "beloved" villain returns in Thomas Harris's HANNIBAL RISING.