Cari Mora

June 17, 2019
In his first novel not centered on Hannibal Lecter in 44 years, bestseller Harris (The Silence of the Lambs) unveils a new villain, killer Hans-Peter Schneider, who rents a house in Miami Beach, Fla., that once belonged to Colombian drug kingpin Pablo Escobar in order to find the gold hidden beneath it. Cari Mora, a beautiful woman who survived a childhood as a conscript in FARC, the Colombian guerilla army, is the home’s caretaker, and Schneider, to whom the “sound of a woman crying is... music” and who uses a liquid cremation machine to dispose of his prey, immediately regards her as a potential victim. When Schneider and Mora first meet, she catches a “whiff of brimstone off him.” Few surprises mark the ensuing duel between the misogynistic sadist and the femme fatale, who learned certain skills from FARC that come in handy in their predictable showdown. The absence of Harris’s usual superior storytelling will dismay fans, but the main problem is that Schneider doesn’t come close to matching Lecter as a memorable monster. One can only hope for a return to form next time. Agent: Morton Janklow, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (May

June 15, 2019
Morbid mysterian Harris (Hannibal Rising, 2006, etc.) returns with a trademark mix of murderous psychopaths and morally iffy good guys. Lesson No. 1: Don't mess with a determined Colombian woman, especially not one with combat experience and no fear of dying. The title character is a case in point: 25, pretty, though with scars that speak to a terrible past. Under the watchful eye of the immigration authorities, she works several jobs, including managing a luxurious Miami property with a murky title, a property that was once owned by drug lord Pablo Escobar and under which he tucked away a trove of gold ingots. Enter Hans-Peter Schneider, a decidedly nasty fellow in the tradition of other Harris villains. Hans-Peter has fangs with "silver in them that shows when he smiles" and is otherwise rather vampiric in aspect, and he has a thing for harvesting organs and selling women into slavery. He's after that gold, and Cari is a mere inconvenience to be dealt with in due time, minus a limb or two, perhaps. So it is with Cari's pool cleaner friend Antonio, anyway, who winds up an object of Hans-Peter's attention: "These were Antonio's legs. That was Antonio's torso. His head was missing." Things get ickier still as heads explode, bob around in liquid cremation machines, and otherwise undergo assorted unpleasantries. Hans-Peter isn't the only one after the gold, of course, and then there are the rising waters thanks to climate change, waters that have burrowed their way under the mansion. It's a race against time--and crocodiles, and all the other ways of dying unhappily in South Florida. It's vintage Harris, with nice twists and elegant ways of expressing just how bad bad people can be. Suffice it to say that, as the story winds to a blood-soaked close, some of the principals probably won't be showing up in a sequel. Refreshingly, entertainingly creepy and with nary a fava bean in sight.

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December 1, 2018

The man who gave us Hannibal Lecter returns with his first stand-alone since debuting with 1975's Black Sunday. Expect hoopla; 30 million copies of Harris's books are out there somewhere, and all his books have been made into films. With a 600,000-copy first printing.

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