The Historian - Elizabeth Kostova

While wandering around her professorial father's library, a precocious 16-year old stumbles across a strange old book with a peculiar illustration of a dragon inside. When she musters up the courage to ask her father about it, she unleashes a long hiddden story of the quest to locate Count Vlad - better known to the outside world as Dracula. The Historian is told through a series of letters - and histories within histories. The girl's father relates how he became interested in the Dracula legend, and the various scholars he met along the way. Intertwined with the hunt are several interesting love stories that keep the action going. I had no idea what this book was about when I picked it up - and I was quickly excited to learn more about the "real life" Dracula. I enjoyed the mixture of history with the occult and found this book to be very well-written - if only about 200 pages too long.