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Bram Stoker's "Dracula" captured the Victorian Public's imagination on its publication in 1897. A gothic composition of love, death and destruction, Stoker weaved worlds of erotica and obsession together in a powder keg of controversial ritual and vampire lore. To attempt to build on such a seminal piece of literature would seem like pure folly but that is exactly what the American author, Elizabeth Kostova, has done with her book "The Historian" with mixed results. This book was the first I'd read by Kostova although "The Historian" is her debut novel. Born in New London, Connecticut, she is a graduate of Yale University. Kostova won the Hopwood Award for the Novel-in-Progress and this, her first novel, was published in 2005, racing to the top of the best-seller charts. It is one of the recommended reads suggested by the all powerful "Richard & Judy Book Club" although that wasn't a factor in me buying it.

"The Historian" is a story told as an unnamed first-person account written in the year 2008 where the narrator is a historian whose father, Paul, unwittingly ends up searching for the vampiric historical figure Vlad Tepes. Discovering an old, vellum-bound book with a wood carving print of a dragon in the center of the book as well as several old letters that are all addressed to '"my dear and unfortunate successor", the young girl confronts her father with her findings. He begins to tell her about how he came to find the unique blank book with the solitary dragon at a library in Oxford during his student years. Unable to discover who the book belonged to; he took it to his mentor, Bartholomew Rossi. Shocked to find that Rossi himself had also found an identical book when he had been a graduate student, Paul learns of the research that had taken Rossi on a journey to delve into the intrigue surrounding Vlad Tepes's final resting place and the folk lore associated with his life and times as well as rumours of vampirism following his beheading at the hands of his Turkish enemies. Returning to the campus to continue his discussions with Professor Rossi, he learns that Professor Rossi has disappeared, leaving a smear of blood on the desk and wall, triggering a labyrinthine struggle to find the missing academic as well as the tomb of the Dracula figure, Vlad Tepes.

"The Historian" is a story told in a layered fashion combining separate plot threads around the young girl's actions in 1972 -1973 when, at the age of sixteen, she began to travel with her father through

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