Pimping "The Historian"

I haven't plugged Elizabeth Kostova’s "The Historian" in a few days. Here's a pretty good review in The Indian Express:

Gleefully I rub my hands together, because the novel already feels like what The Da Vinci Code ought to have been but wasn’t: an intelligent romp through personal and collective history, literature and legend, led on through a maze of obscure codes and secret symbols, hidden texts and medieval traditions; and, of course, the imagination. A novel that brings together the mystique of Vlad the Impaler, Dracula, and Evil. Best of all, a sumptuous quest-novel with an intelligent woman as protagonist and narrator. And her narration is cool, thoughtful, intelligent. Much is promised, then, and the novel mostly lives up to the promise. It is an academic quest, far more in the tradition of A S Byatt’s Possession than in the farcical potboiler style of Dan Brown.