Red Dragon by Thomas Harris

Red Dragon is a novel written by Thomas Harris, first published in 1981. Red Dragon was the first novel to feature Thomas Harris's character Dr. Hannibal Lecter, a brilliant psychiatrist and cannibalistic serial killer.
In 1980, a serial killer popularly nicknamed the Tooth Fairy stalks and murders seemingly random families during sequential full moons. He kills the Jacobi family in Birmingham on Saturday June 28 and the Leeds family in Atlanta on July 26. Two days after the latter murder, Special Agent Jack Crawford seeks out his protégé, Will Graham, a brilliant profiler who was the agent who actually captured Hannibal Lecter three years earlier, but retired after Lecter almost killed him. Crawford goes to Sugarloaf Key and pleads with Graham for his assistance, and Graham reluctantly agrees. After checking over the crime scenes, with only minimal insight, he realizes that he must once again visit Lecter and seek his help in capturing the Tooth Fairy. The Tooth Fairy is actually a disturbed man named Francis Dolarhyde. Calling himself The Great Red Dragon, Dolarhyde is unable to control his violent, sexual urges. These conditions were born from the systematic child abuse he suffered at the hands of his grandmother.
Graham continues to run into complications, the first being Freddy Lounds, a tabloid reporter who follows Graham relentlessly for leads on the Tooth Fairy story. Further complicating the investigation is the secret correspondence between Lecter and Dolarhyde, where Lecter provides Dolarhyde with Graham's home address, endangering Graham's wife and child, who are evacuated to a remote farm which belongs to Crawford's brother... (Summary by Wikipedia)