Cari Mora: from the creator of Hannibal Lecter

I am a book/story addict - Fast delivery, great quality and well worth the price - quality product and service, thank you.

We’ve waited thirteen years for a follow-up to HANNIBAL RISING, and what Thomas Harris serves up is not another episode from the Lecter legend but a Florida crime vault caper. Disappointment clouded the first few chapters of this for me until I was sucked in by the sheer pace of the story. Cari Mora is the 25-year-old caretaker of a house on the Miami Beach waterfront, a property that belonged to the late Colombian drug king Pablo Escobar. Buried behind its crumbling sea wall is a safe containing $25 million in gold bars. One of Escobar’s successors sends a team to crack the electronically protected safe. Others are also after it. Colombia’s cartel war opens a new front. The basic story here could be an episode of MIAMI VICE, but Cari’s early life as a child soldier with Colombian guerrillas gives an extra dimension. One of the bad guys likes to mutilate women before disposing of them in an acid bath. This – and a man-eating crocodile under the house – bring gothic echoes of our favourite monster. A rival cannibal makes a brief appearance. Mr Harris now writes a leaner, meaner prose (I didn’t like his random mixing of past and present tense), but there are frequent glimpses of the master’s old magic way with words. A storage facility smells of “sour shoes and old bedding ... the air of plans miscarried”. This is a ghoulish, garish read, pretty well unputdownable. That said, one vital ingredient has been left out. Come back, Hannibal! We miss you.

Thomas Harris is one of my favourite authors, and so I was expecting a lot better than what I got with this. The story isn't particularly engaging and the characters are all over the place. We hardly get to know Cari Mora (although she's very good looking we are constantly told) a child soldier who escaped her paramilitary captors and now lives in Miami. The villain of the piece is a hairless freak who has his own liquid crematorium and harvests human organs. The story never really gets into gear and some plot developments come along and go nowhere. There's even a weird chapter from a Crocodiles point of view! The climax is pretty exciting, but then unfortunately degenerates into cliché. All a bit disappointing from a once essential author.

If you’re a Harris fan, you’ll be disappointed by this pedestrian thriller; if you’re not, this isn’t the best place to start. It’s not all bad: the descriptive writing about Miami wildlife is deftly done, and there’s a powerful sense of place. The flashbacks to Cari’s childhood are the best part of the book, by some margin. There’s also something to be said for a relatively straightforward thriller which does have a sense of propulsive momentum. It could be a good film, and probably would be a better TV movie than a novel. But for the most part, this is stodgy, sub-Narcos fare (Narcos is fleetingly referenced in the text, and there’s a scene in a hospital which seems directly inspired by Breaking Bad). The plot’s promising - the hunt for Pablo Escobar’s hidden gold - but it doesn’t ever quite play out in a satisfying way, leaving some loose ends - but I didn’t care that they weren’t really ever cleared up: it seemed the least of the novel’s many problems. Some of the writing - eg many verbless sentences, and needless repetition - is just really bad. Ultimately, the best that can be said for Cari Mora is that it’s a short read, much shorter than I’d imagined. But it falls woefully short of the massive, entirely unjustified hype.

Cari Mora has a very promising opening of 40 - 50 pages. A story begins to unfold with an interesting range of characters. Thereafter the book loses all focus. The story fragments, transitions between chapters are hard to follow, entire sections of the book are unclear and there is no tension. The resolution is dull and uninteresting and the last bit of the story is just tacked on. There are a few sentences that demonstrate the tremendous craft and talent of the man, but nothing more. It is so sad to write this review, as Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs are magnificent books. In comparison to those books, the present title has nothing to offer and is less interesting even than Hannibal Rising where the Lecter series descended to self-mockery (having commenced self-parody in Hannibal which nevertheless had some fine writing).

Great read, couldn't put it down. Yes, it's different from the Lecter books, but this book is just as addictive as Harris' other works.

I read a lot of bad reviews which stopped me rushing to buying this, despite being a fan of his previous books. I eventually succumbed and bought the kindle version for £1.00 I thoroughly enjoyed it and read it in three sittings, although it’s more of a long novella than a book. There are similarities with his Lecter storylines, with a female protagonist (who saves birds rather than lambs), who’s tougher and more determined than she appears and an intelligent, artistic villain with perverse tastes and obsessions. However, unlike the Lecter books, much of the descriptive element and dialogues of the book are stripped back for the reader to fill in with their own imagination. This speeds the story along to a fast conclusion but possibly is the reason for so many bad reviews as it’s not what you expect from this author, especially after paying £20 for a thick hardback. I found the characters, even those making fleeting appearances over a few chapters, to be interesting and accurate depictions of low ranking South American criminality, taken as a whole rather than as individual characters. Miami was also well depicted and I could picture where scenes were happening which maybe added to my enjoyment. Recommended, but not at full price.

I have been waiting forever for Thomas Harris to write another book, the others were so good but be warned it is a let down...its an expensive hardback and the words are HUGE so I read it in two days...it is an okay read but I got two impressions, the first was that it was something he wrote long ago prior to his other novels...a bit like a novices practice run and the other impression was that it read like an embellished film script...here's hoping eh Thomas? Kching.