Cari Mora

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. [em]Agent: Morton Janklow, Janklow & Nesbit Assoc. (May [/em]