O editor, where art thou?

It seems appropriate that of all the characters in classic literature, Elizabeth Kostova chose to resurrect Dracula for her 2005 tome The Historian. There's no shortage of narrative threads to take up from Bram Stoker's original creation, but most importantly, the central character is notoriously hard to pin down to any one time and place. So voila, your novel can leap from locale to exotic locale, across several centuries and still have a reasonable shot at maintaining a plausible plot.

Kostova's detailed settings are the best aspect of The Historian, a novel that jumps from Cambridge, England, to the bazaars of Istanbul and into the dark forests of Romania and Bulgaria. The reason for all this travel is all a little murky, as the plot of the novel unfolds painfully slowly. The historian of the title is nominally a bookish diplomat, living in Amsterdam with his teenage daughter, who serves as the book's first narrator. She dutifully follows him on his diplomatic travels, but when he suddenly disappears following a trip to the University of Cambridge, she sets out to discover the truth. Coming upon a cache of her father's letters, she learns how intertwinded her history is with the legend of Vlad the Impaler, and how her father's love of scholarship and books sent him on a chase that would put him face to face with the legendary tyrant.

Kostova's plot echoes some of the points of The Da Vinci Code--legendary figures, clues hidden in libraries, mysterious forces trying to thwart intrepid scholars and of course the continuous border-hopping--but while that book had a breakneck pace to keep the reader occupied, The Historian unfolds at a painfully slow rate over its 642 pages. Kostova moves it along fairly well over the course of the first 200 pages or so, but then quickly becomes mired in details that I felt did little to add to the story. Adding to its ponderous pace is the use of several different narrators, a technique that only serves to lengthen the proceedings by requiring backstory for each. The germ of the story is a good idea, and there were portions where I was really gripped by the plot turns. But just as quickly, I was back to slogging through minutae. With tighter editing, The Historian would be more appealing, but asking someone to pick through over 600 pages is a request that only the most dedicated readers would likely undertake.