Imagine that Dracula is a real historic figure, that Bram Stoker got a lot of the details right in his novel, but that Dracula himself is still alive (er, undead) in the present day. That's the premise of The Historian. The story is told mostly via letters from a historian to his historian daughter, explaining his multi-decade search for Dracula's tomb, and leading her to a climax (get your head out of the gutter — not that kind of climax) with the vampire himself.

The Historian is compared a lot to The Da Vinci Code, but the comparison is misleading, and the two books are likely to appeal to very different audiences. True, both focus on stuffy academic protagonists who travel to exotic locations that house historic artifacts. However, where Dan Brown's writing is fast-paced to a fault, Kostova's is much more ornate and "writerly".

That said, in spite of its more obvious flaws, I enjoyed The Da Vinci Code a little more. Kostova places far too much of the plot inside correspondence, and it's impossible to imagine anyone writing letters like these — they wander around for hundreds of pages without getting to the point, in spite of the fact that they are intended to serve as a warning to author's daughter.

The Historian is an impressive first novel, and with a more assertive editor, it could have been great. As it is, it's a solid historical literary thriller, but be warned: if you think it might be too slow for you, it will be.