Review of The Historian by Elizabeth Kostova

History Has Never Been so Scary!

I just finished reading Elizabeth Kostova's supernatural thriller, and I'm like, whoa. Okay, that is possibly the most un-erudite thing you've ever read in a book review, but it's my immediate and visceral reaction. I will try to be more precise forthwith.

The Historian is the tale of our narrator, who when she is sixteen years old finds a curious book and a packet of letters in her father's study. When she questions him about it, he is extremely reluctant to discuss it, but while accompanying him on his travels around Europe as a cold-war-era diplomat, she slowly begins to draw a tale from him that seems unbelievable at first, yet is supported by the letters, written by his former doctoral advisor, Professor Bartholomew Rossi, who disappeared under mysterious and terrifying circumstances immediately after passing the letters to his advisee, the narrator's father.

As she gets more pieces of the puzzle over the course of a couple of years, our intrepid narrator begins to do research of her own into the supernatural historical mystery that has caused her father the loss of his cherished friend, Rossi, and possibly the loss as well of her mother, who perished, also under mysterious circumstances that her father will not discuss, when she was an infant. She continues to chase clues until her father also disappears abruptly, leaving her in a race against time to find him and to find out what happened to her mother before all is lost to a predator who seems to be stalking them as readily as they stalk him.