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Hannibal, by Thomas Harris (Heinemann, £16.99).

It was, of course, the most eagerly awaited literary sequel of the decade. Despite tight control over its release by publishers on both sides of the Atlantic, it was reviewed at length in the news section of the British Observer newspaper three days before publication; in the New York Times, it was reviewed by Stephen King.

As if to sidestep expectations set impossibly high, Hannibal turns out not to be a sequel to novel version of The Silence of the Lambs, but to the movie, and specifically to Sir Anthony Hopkins's mesmerising performance as Thomas Harris's most famous creation, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, the urbane cannibalistic serial killer. As in the movies, the cachet of the star slews the narrative. Although the disintegration of the career of FBI agent Clarice Starling, the heroine of The Silence of the Lambs, is a strong and canny subplot, and Hannibal Lecter does not appear for more than a hundred pages, Starling is spear carrier and deus ex machina to Lecter's starring role. In places, the novel even reads like a brilliantly precise screenplay, with descriptions in the present tense, stage directions, and even tracking shots which follow Dr. Lecter about his business in the world and into the Memory Palace he has constructed within his own skull.

It is seven years after Lecter engineered his escape from the maximum security asylum in which he was incarcerated. When last seen in the movie, he was about to have the asylum's director for dinner; in the novel, he was glimpsed enjoying a glass of excellent Batrad-Montrachet as he prepared to leave for Brazil. Now, as he is about to take up the prestigious position of curator of the Palazzo Capponi in Florence, his assumed identity of the scholarly Dr. Fell has been penetrated by an Italian policeman, who has sold the information to one of Lecter's surviving victims, Mason Verger. Verger plans to capture Lecter and feed him alive to specially bred wild pigs; Clarice Starling, about to be drummed out of the FBI after a controversial shoot-out with a gang of drug-dealers, is drawn into Verger's spider-web as bait

All of Harris's trademarks are present: precise characterisation and razor-sharp prose; laconic dispensation of arcane bits of information, from explication of Dante's poetry to the minutiae of FBI and police investigations; searingly memorable setpieces rendered with pinpoint precision, and murders so inventively gruesome as to draw comparison with the most bloodthirsty horror novel; a momentum which, as with its predecessor, kept this reviewer reading until late into the night. You'll be hard-pressed to find a more erudite or gripping thriller this year.

But unlike The Silence of the Lambs's seamless escalation in tension, Hannibal's plot is more discursive -- in particular, the episode in Florence is an almost self- contained sidebar -- and there's a creeping sense that Harris has fallen in love with his creation, no longer Hannibal the Cannibal, fiendish inhuman monster locked in the asylum basement, but Dr. Lecter, Byronic anti-hero. Pages are given over to details of Dr. Lecter's shopping habits and examples of his exquisite taste, and it is notable that of all his murders, only those of people with uncouth habits and nasty dispositions are dealt with in detail. The corrupt Italian policeman who betrays Lecter to Mason Verger is given a spectacularly apt and very public dispatch while the disposal of the previous caretaker of the Palazzo Capponi is mentioned only in passing, and Mason Verger is a monstrous paedophile who, although faceless and paralysed after his encounter with Lecter, still torments children so that (a nice touch, this) their tears can be added to his daily martini. All this blurs, perhaps deliberately, the novel's biblical sense of morality.

More fatally, for someone who so dislikes being quantified that he famously ate the liver of a census taker "...with some fava beans and a big Amarone", Lecter is given a psychological wound suffered in childhood to explain, if not his cannibalism, then his increasing attraction to Clarice Starling. It's an unwanted dimension to a character otherwise depicted, in fervent Old Testament prose, as the very devil. A gypsy employed in an attempt to get one of Lecter's fingerprints identifies him as "Shaitan, Son of Morning...", and Mason Verger is tormented by the thought of Lecter "...going to and fro in the earth, and walking up and down in it", a description of the devil going about his business in the Book of Job (in The Silence of the Lambs, holed up in a hotel after his escape, Lecter is described as enjoying "going to and fro in his suite and walking up and down in it.") Lecter dwindles a little beneath the imposition of a traumatic past, and he dwindles further when he and Starling bond over a horrid feast and Harris's romantic impulse overflows; in the end, Dr. Lecter, the most seductive and enduring of all fictional serial killers, appears to have seduced his own creator.

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