Hannibal Rising takes on the journey of Hannibal Lecter from precocious and privileged child in an Eastern Europe on the brink of the chaos of the Second World War through a troubled adolescence and into his early adult life. His experiences as a victim of war crimes go some way to explaining some of the idiosyncrasies he exhibits in Harris's earlier novels. However it isn't really clear how, or why, his criminality progresses from a desire for revenge upon those who have done him wrong, and quite seriously so, to an apparently motiveless pattern of behaviour in his later life. Although I found Hannibal Rising to be entertaining and engaging in its own right it didn't really seem to add anything helpful to the Hannibal Lecter series as a whole.