Brian Raftery's investigation of the serial killer, cannibal, gourmand, and pop cultural icon Hannibal Lecter is a very good book that sounds as if it should be a very bad one. When I first heard that Raftery, a respected entertainment journalist, was writing what purported to be a biography of Lecter, I both groaned and wondered about copyright law. After all, Lecter's creator Thomas Harris is still alive, and the four novels he has written that feature the character— Red Dragon , The Silence