Clarice Starling - The Silence of The Lambs

In The Silence of the Lambs, Starling is a student at the FBI Academy. She hopes to work at the Behavioral Science Unit, tracking down serial killers and ultimately apprehending them. Her mentor, FBI director Jack Crawford, sends her to interview Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a brilliant psychiatrist and cannibalistic serial killer. He is housed in a Baltimore mental institution. Upon arriving at the asylum for her first interview with Lecter, the asylum manager Frederick Chilton makes a crude pass at her, which she rebuffs; this helps her bond with Lecter, who also despises Chilton. As time passes, Lecter gives Starling information about Buffalo Bill, a currently active serial killer being hunted by the FBI, but only in exchange for personal information, which Crawford has specifically warned her to keep secret from Lecter.

She tells Lecter that she was raised in a small town in West Virginia with her father, a police officer. When she was about 10 years old, her father was shot when responding to a robbery; he died a month after the incident. Starling was sent to live with her uncle on a Montana sheep and horse farm, from which she briefly ran away in horror when she witnessed the lambs being slaughtered (the title of the book refers to her being haunted by the screaming she heard from the lambs).

She spent the rest of her childhood in a Lutheran orphanage. She graduated from the University of Virginia and applied to the FBI's training school.

During the investigation, Starling is assigned to coax Lecter into revealing Buffalo Bill's identity; Lecter gives her clues in the form of cryptic, riddling information designed to help Starling figure it out for herself. The two grow to respect each other, so when Lecter escapes during a transfer engineered by Chilton to a state prison in Tennessee, Starling feels that he "would consider it rude" to attack her by surprise and kill her without talking to her first.

Starling deduces from Lecter's hints that Buffalo Bill's first victim had a personal relationship with him, and so goes to the victim's home in Belvedere, Ohio, to interview people who knew her. She unknowingly stumbles onto the killer himself, Jame Gumb (he is living under the alias "Jack Gordon" when they meet). When she sees a Death's Head moth, the same rare kind that Bill stuffs in the throats of each of his victims, flutter through the house, she knows that she has found her man and tries to arrest him. Gumb flees, and Starling follows him into his basement, where his latest victim is alive and screaming for help. Gumb turns off the electricity in the basement, and stalks Starling through the rooms wearing night vision goggles. He is about to shoot her when she hears him behind her and opens fire into the darkness, killing him. The victim is rescued.

Weeks later, Lecter writes Starling a letter from a hotel room somewhere in Detroit asking her if the lambs have stopped screaming.

The final scene of the novel has Starling sleeping peacefully at a friend's vacation house at the Maryland seashore.