Garlic and crucifixes are traditionally part of the arsenal for vanquishing vampires. But in "The Historian," the Dracula-da Vinci Code hybrid that has emerged as the most heavily hyped novel of the summer, the first-time author Elizabeth Kostova tries a different tactic. Perhaps even the undead can be talked to death.

    In a ponderous, many-layered book that is exquisitely versed in the art of stalling, Ms. Kostova steeps her readers in Dracula lore. She visits many libraries, monasteries, relics of the Byzantine and Ottoman empires, crypts, restaurants, scholars and folk-song-singing peasants. Every now and then a mysterious pale, sinister figure will materialize, only to vanish bewilderingly. The book's characters find this a lot more baffling than readers will.

    "You've heard of Vlad Tepes - the Impaler?" Prof. Bartholomew Rossi asks Paul, his student, early in the novel. "Really among the nastiest of all medieval European tyrants. It's estimated that he slaughtered at least 20,000 of his fellow Wallachians and Transylvanians over the years." The book's map of cold war Europe includes the Romanian regions Wallachia and Transylvania, as well as Lake Snagov, one of several scenic spots that Dracula is suspected of using as eternal homes. 

    A $2 million advance, a movie sale and the prospect of publication in at least 28 languages all attest to Ms. Kostova's marketable knowledge of horror lore. She has Professor Rossi explain that the word Dracula refers to the Holy Roman Empire's Order of the Dragon. She lets the professor reveal how "at the end of the 19th century, a disturbed and melodramatic author - Abraham Stoker - gets hold of the name Dracula and fastens it on a creature of his own invention, a vampire." Her own contribution to the genre involves resurrecting Vlad the Impaler, separating him from Stoker's version and leading readers on a scavenger hunt based on Vlad's marauding travels and evil deeds.

    The vampire's power to inflict misery pales beside that of the book's contorted narrative structure. "The Historian" begins in 1972 as an account by Paul's daughter, who is looking back on these events, and whose introduction to the novel is dated Jan. 15, 2008. Her reflections are interspersed with Paul's long story, which he laboriously put into writing. Paul spends much of the book with Helen Rossi, who will eventually be the mother of his child, the original narrator, as they search for Professor Rossi - Helen's father - after he disappears. 

    Helen writes too, but only brief notes. This automatically makes her the book's most likeable character, despite the fact that she bears an unnerving resemblance to Vlad.

    The professor has also left behind reams of extremely professorial letters. "My quick-minded reader, you are staying awake for me, following my lucubrations with care, and I bless you for it," he observes with typically stilted rigor. 

    For various reasons, each of these characters seeks to discover where the 15th-century monster was interred. This mission allows Paul and Helen to meet cute at a library where each is immersed in research. Helen makes the first move. "Dracula?" she asks provocatively. "Those appear to be primary sources you have got there." In this book's scholarly scheme, nothing is sexier than a primary source with a dragon connection.

    As "The Historian" unfolds, Ms. Kostova moves her characters around the globe with exhausting determination. She also finds endless ways to interrupt them as they speak. ("I must pause here, brave reader; I cannot bring myself to write more, for the moment.") But if these maneuvers are meant to heighten suspense, they have the opposite effect: the tactics are irritatingly transparent and coy. And they illustrate why not every writer in the wildly burgeoning history-mystery category is liable to be the next Dan Brown.

    Although "The Historian" is wearyingly long, it would be a difficult book to compress. No one of Ms. Kostova's travelogue episodes (of Romania, Hungary and Turkey, among other places) is any more expendable than the others; it's just that the cumulative effect of so much tourism is smothering. Only occasionally does the book deliver the kind of jolt that explains its prematurely inflated reputation. At one point, Paul and his daughter are at a cafe in Italy when a street painter tries to sell them a watercolor. It depicts father, daughter and "a broad-shouldered, dark-headed figure, a crisp black silhouette, among the cheerful colors of awning and tablecloths." Uh-oh: the table at which the painter saw this specter has been vacant all afternoon.

    Notwithstanding such piquant glimpses, it takes more than 500 pages for the book's undead superstar to arrive for real. When he does, he personifies the thought that every age gets the Dracula it deserves. This book's version is quite the egomaniac; he is very interested in the medieval equivalent of his own press clippings. "I became an historian," he says, "in order to preserve my own history forever."

    As it vacillates between generating suspense and showing off erudition, the book frequently speculates on the meaning of history. "There is survival and survival, the historian learns to his grief," Ms. Kostova writes. "The very worst impulses of humankind can survive generations, centuries, even millennia. And the best of our individual efforts can die with us at the end of a single lifetime."

On a more positive note, one of her characters speaks of being "struck by the excitement of the traveler who looks history in her subtle face." But history's subtle face is not the one displayed here.