The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris

The Silence of the Lambs by American author Thomas Harris. First published in 1988, The Silence of the Lambs is a sequel to Thomas Harris' 1981 novel Red Dragon. Both novels feature the cannibalistic serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter, this time pitted against FBI Special Agent Clarice Starling.
The novel The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris takes place in February 1983: Clarice Starling, a young FBI trainee, being asked to carry out an errand by Jack Crawford, the head of the FBI division that draws up psychological profiles of serial killers. Starling is asked to present a questionnaire to brilliant forensic psychiatrist and cannibalistic sociopath, Hannibal Lecter. Lecter is serving nine consecutive life sentences in a Maryland mental institution for a series of brutal murders. It is revealed that Jack Crawford is hunting for a serial killer dubbed "Buffalo Bill", whose modus operandi involves kidnapping overweight women, starving them for about a week, and then killing and skinning them, before dumping the bodies in nearby rivers. The nickname was started by Kansas City Homicide, as a joke that "he likes to skin his humps." Throughout the investigation, Starling periodically returns to Lecter in search of information, and the two form a strange relationship in which he offers her cryptic clues in return for information about her unhappy childhood as an orphan. When Bill's sixth victim is found in West Virginia, Starling helps Crawford perform the autopsy. Starling finds a moth pupa in the throat of the victim, and just as Lecter predicted, she has been scalped... (Summary by Wikipedia)