Frazier’s second novel, “Thirteen Moons,” is both more accessible than “Cold Mountain” and somewhat less likely to catch on. “Cold Mountain” was stonily committed to its 19th century setting. You either submitted to the stately pace and rural preoccupations of that earlier time or you were repelled by the surface of the novel’s prose and became one of those people who pled mystification at its popularity. Those of us who could adjust to Frazier’s style, though, found ourselves genuinely transported — something historical fiction can rarely achieve — into the mental rhythms of a far less jittery and overstimulated way of life.

“Thirteen Moons” is also set in the Smoky Mountains, but it’s really a western masquerading as a faux memoir. The voice — first-person narration from one Will Cooper, an orphan adopted by the chief of a dwindling Cherokee village who goes on to become a lawyer, a state senator, a colonel in the Civil War, and most important, the defender of the Indians’ last shred of their old life — is pure frontier raconteur. Cooper is roughly based on William Holland Thomas, a famous Carolina figure who led a company of Cherokee fighters in the Confederate Army.

Despite the widely held notion that irony is an affectation uniquely beloved by postmodern smartypants, you can find plenty of 19th century American writers who relished the device, especially when describing life on the nation’s ragged Western edge. They got a kick out of applying the decorous language of the Victorian establishment to the brutal reality around them. Frazier adopts their tone when he has Cooper observe, while lingering by the Mississippi, that “little brown frogs lived in the mud of the riverbank, and pink-headed buzzards fell in drunkard angles from the sky and stepped through the mud to eat them, and sometimes the commerce between the two parties went on right at the legs of my table.”

Although Cooper is no less a man of his time than Inman, the hero of “Cold Mountain,” the Twainian humor he uses in telling his story is an element of the American style that’s stuck with us. Autobiography, which is what “Thirteen Moons” pretends to be, is the signature narrative form of the moment. As a result, Cooper’s voice feels more familiar and congenial than the third-person narration of “Cold Mountain,” and contemporary readers should slip into Frazier’s second novel more easily. I wouldn’t necessarily call this a concession to the marketplace, since you could hardly expect a fellow like Cooper to recount his life in the somber, mythic mode of “Cold Mountain,” but “Thirteen Moons” still lacks the fierce, uncompromising quality that made “Cold Mountain” so striking.

“Cold Mountain” had the air of a book written by a man holed up in a house in the woods, aiming to please no one but himself; “Thirteen Moons” is a novel with a relationship, albeit an uneasy one, to the world. This is most evident in a passage where Cooper — a great reader, like Ada in “Cold Mountain” — scoffs at an essay in a journal decrying the “state of recent fiction. Its judgment was harsh, on the grounds that we live in a happy, beautiful, virile age. And yet our stories are unnecessarily glum. We do not want sighs or tears. We are all seeking happiness, whether through money or position. It is our privilege to resent any attempts to force unhappy thoughts on us.”

Whether or not Appleton’s Journal of Literature, Science and the Arts ever ran such a piece (I’m not convinced that the term “recent fiction” was common currency in the mid-1800s), this is a flagrant dig at the philistines who objected to the gloomy ending of “Cold Mountain.” Frazier borrows the credibility of his likable, no-nonsense narrator to take a pot shot at his own critics, a self-serving anachronism the author of “Cold Mountain” would never have stooped to. Cooper’s reply to the critic’s complaint is to wordlessly take a couple of swigs from his flask; it’s too stupid to merit any further response.

Aside from the occasional lapse, Cooper is good company. His adventures in the uncharted Indian Nation, where his relatives sell him into indentured servitude working as a clerk at an isolated trading post, and his later exploits in Washington and traveling along the Mississippi make for amusing reading. From his adoptive father, Bear, he learns what’s left of the Cherokee ways, and this comes with ample dollops of classic village humor, mostly about the humiliating situations men get into on account of sex. The structure of “Thirteen Moons” is necessarily episodic — that’s how life happens, as Cooper explains at one point — with a few recurring themes.

First among these themes is the passing away of the Indians’ world. Some of the best scenes in the novel take place during the “removal” of 1838, President Andrew Jackson’s brutal program designed to expel all Native Americans from lands east of the Mississippi River. Bear and the small community he presides over manage to elude the infamous Trail of Tears thanks to a considerable amount of wheeling, dealing and deed accumulation on the part of Cooper. The fate of a less fortunate Cherokee, an aged patriarch known as Charley, as he tries to hide his clan in the mountains, serves as the novel’s grim centerpiece.

The other, less effective motif in Cooper’s story is his thwarted, lifelong love for Claire, a girl he wins in a poker game from a part-Indian horse thief and plantation owner named Featherstone, and then loses again when Featherstone reneges on the deal. Later on, the two young lovers conduct a largely al fresco affair featuring enough good wine, sunburned buttocks and discussions of Byron’s poetry to suggest that Frazier wants to wrassle novelist Jim Harrison for the title of official Lusty Yet Cultured Old Coot of American literature. Cooper and Claire are kept apart for reasons not always entirely clear, so he gets to go on and on about how he’s never forgotten her, keeps an old coat in the attic that might still harbor a little of her scent, and much, much later receives mysterious staticky calls on the newfangled telephone in which he thinks he hears, faintly, her voice.

This relationship is pretty notional and not in the least bit interesting or believable. I suspect it was tossed into the mix to make Cooper seem sweeter and more romantic. (William Holland Thomas, the historical figure on whom Cooper was based, had a wife and children, a far more intriguing scenario.) Cooper goes on to do his share of whoring and courting, coming close to marrying once or twice, but he insists that “had Claire been fully mine since I won her as a boy, I would have lived a life of utter fidelity.” A nice sentiment, and one conveniently untested by the events of Cooper’s life as Frazier constructs them. But why be so scrupulous about sticking to the rambling, unnovelistic structure of real experience and then turn your hero’s love life into the stuff of a Hollywood movie?

The love story in many novels — especially historical novels — is a lot like the explosions in the better action movies. It may not be what you came to see, but a certain portion of the audience requires it to feel satisfied, and it’s easy enough to sit through while you wait for the better parts. In Frazier’s case, the best parts are the ones that hark back to Laura Ingalls Wilder, describing the stock of the frontier trading post and the intricacies of commerce in a place where currency is rare, the matrimonial and wintering practices of the Cherokee, the fact that a single deer’s brain contains exactly enough of the right ingredients to cure a single deer’s hide, the details of the spells conducted by the local medicine woman and the operation of the Wayah community under Cooper’s leadership.

The Indians and local woodsmen are mostly trading in hides and ginseng at the time Cooper arrives at the post. A man who arrives to ship the takings east tells the boy “the ginseng went all the way around the world in sailing ships and was sold to Chinamen, who ate it and believed it made their jimson stand up straighter. So I was just the second man in a long chain of people working to make that Chinaman stiff.” There’s more romance in that notion than in all of Cooper’s dreams of Claire, and I would rather read 10 pages of Frazier’s descriptions of trailside cookery (detailed enough that you could re-create the meals, and vivid enough that you want to) than any of the passages in which the two lovers cavort through streams and fields.

Frazier has an instinctive understanding of small-scale capitalism as just an intensified form of domesticity, and his depictions of both are usually the most absorbing aspects of his books. There are bear fights and wilderness ordeals aplenty in “Thirteen Moons,” too, but these, after all, are the sort of stories we’ve heard a hundred times, whereas I’ve never encountered a recipe for yellow-jacket soup before. Likewise, it’s the tobacco curing and the cider brewing that I remember best from “Cold Mountain,” not the obligatory battle scenes.

If only Frazier hadn’t adopted so many of the dreary mannerisms of today’s literary fiction since writing “Cold Mountain.” Exhibit A is the book’s pervasive and ill-fitting tone of elegiac melancholy, beginning with an introductory scene in which the elderly Cooper takes up a pen to record his life, ponder his decrepitude and grouse about such modern intrusions as electricity, movies and the phone. Railroads, he grumbles, “are ruinous noisy machines that hold no reference to anything in the green world or to the past in general.” I can’t see much reason for this framing device, except that it explains how the story is being told (a consideration that never troubles, say, “David Copperfield”) and it effectively stifles the possibility that a reader might take some vulgar pleasure in wondering how it all turns out. (Memo to young novelists: If the phrase “As I look down the misty corridor of time…” could be applied in any way at all to the opening pages of your book, cut them.)

At the heart of this is the implication — telegraphed in that passage concerning idiots who complain that “recent fiction” is “unnecessarily glum” — that art should not be too energetic or entertaining. By this logic, literature is in fact necessarily glum. The suggestion that it might be otherwise rates only a snort and another pull of whiskey, because, as all truly literate people know, great writing is an earnest business entailing the contemplation of the eternal verities of existence — all of which boil down to the fact that life is very, very sad.

Frazier is far from alone among contemporary literary novelists in believing that the only appropriate theme for serious fiction is the pitifulness of the human condition, the inevitability of loss and decline, the inability of people to get what they want, the torments of memory and so on. You can find the same attitude in writers as different from him as Jonathan Safran Foer and David Foster Wallace. Granted, this is an understandable response to the relentless demand in pop culture for positive lessons, happy endings and uplift. But, being a reflex, it usually winds up feeling as trite as the stimulus.

Placing his narrator at death’s door allows Frazier to favor us with such reflections as the following: “My future is behind me”; “We all go about burdened with the reality that we are the broken-off ends of true people. It is the severe vengeance Creation takes on us for living”; “When all you know is lost and gone forever, does it become sweeter in the mind?”; “You find yourself exiled in a transformed world, peopled by strangers.” This is meant to be deep, the seasoned thought of a man who’s lived long enough to know better than to consider himself wise. But it’s really just a higher class of clichi (easily recognizable as such by anyone who doesn’t subsist on a literary diet of Oprah picks) and in such large servings, it’s tiresome. Some fine novels have been written about old age. (One recent example is “A Slight Trick of the Mind,” by Mitch Cullin.) They succeed by treating it as a subject of infinite complexity, rather than just the occasion to slap a patina of gravity on a story in danger of being taken too lightly.

There is, of course, a real tragedy at the core of “Thirteen Moons,” which is the erasure of the Cherokee by the European-Americans. But it must be said that every aspect of this tale, from the depredations of smallpox, to the tribes’ fables about the once-noble animal spirits who have fled their land, to the Indian villages plowed under by corn farmers, to the glimpses of vanishing traditions and reminiscences of the days “before the arrival of the Spaniards and their metal hats,” feels very familiar. It’s not clear that it urgently needs to be told again, at least not in this particular incarnation.

“Thirteen Moons” arrives in the year after Civil War novels won the Pulitzer Prize (“March” by Geraldine Brooks) and the National Book Critics Circle award (“The March” by E.L. Doctorow), and a World War II novel (“Europe Central” by William Vollmann) took the National Book Award. Some critics have ventured to call historical fiction the defining literary mode of our day. Perhaps they’re right, and if so, alas. It’s as if literary fiction can only carry us backward, to a world whose conditions and moral dilemmas can, with the advantage of hindsight, be tidily comprehended and easily weighed. In “Thirteen Moons,” Frazier is double-shielded from the present. His hero recoils from innovations, like railroads, that, in our day, have already become the stuff of nostalgia. The ones we can’t imagine living without, like electricity and telephones, are cast as the first encroachments against the book-centered culture in which Cooper is steeped. It’s as if literature itself were, like the Cherokees, being inexorably pushed out of its rightful kingdom.

Frazier and many others surely believe just that, and not without cause. No wonder a book like “Thirteen Moons,” for all its humor, feels so mournful. In their view, the novel, like Cooper, is on its last legs and so prefers the candlelight that falls more kindly on its wrinkled face. Better to retreat to its room and reminisce than to grapple with the new world being made by telephones and movies — let alone cable TV and the Internet. Not every reader agrees. There are those who think that all this despair and — yes  unnecessary glumness is a bit premature, who still believe that the novel has plenty to say about life in this jangled, vital, frantically mutating and always exciting world before it lies down and dies. We’re the ones way out in Indian Country.

Waters tells the stories of four Londoners, going backward in time. We first see them rummaging around the wreckage of their lives in 1947, then at the tail end of the war in 1944, and finally in 1941, where we learn about the mistakes, illusions and leaps of faith that lead them to their stunned condition at the book’s beginning. The keystone of the story is Kay Langrish, an ambulance driver and medic who works the night watch during the Blitz, saving lives and pulling body parts out of London houses after they’ve been pulverized by German bombs.

Kay was a hero, as one of the other characters surmises, “one of those women, in other words, who charged about happily during the war, and then got left over.” A well-born, impeccably groomed butch lesbian, she is, as a former lover puts it, “such a bloody gentleman. She’s more of a gentleman than any real man I ever knew.” The other characters, most of whom are touched by Kay’s strength in one way or another, include Vivien, a pretty young woman in love with a feckless married man; Vivien’s sexually ambiguous brother Duncan, who does a stint in prison for reasons withheld until the book’s end; and Helen, another lesbian, more femme, a little weak, fluttery and adrift in her own life.

Waters’ previous books have also been historical novels, but set in the 1800s. It may come as a surprise to her fans that she depicts the Victorian era as allowing far more lustiness and adventure than the people in “The Night Watch” enjoy. Her WWII characters are middle-class Britons, not the servants, petty criminals, entertainers and other renegades of “Tipping the Velvet” and “Fingersmith,” and as a result, they cling fiercely to their respectability. Whether they’re women who love other women or, like Vivien, simply women who love the wrong man, they seem paralyzed between their desires and the conventions that constitute life as they know it.

World War II still haunts and fascinates the British; it was their shining hour and the thing that finally did in the empire. The central mystery of “The Night Watch” is how the war shaped the fates of Waters’ characters. Perhaps it gave them the opportunity to be more fully themselves — Kay could exercise her gallantry on a grander scale; Vivien felt liberated by the fact that “we might all be dead tomorrow. You have to take what you want, don’t you? What you really want?” Duncan’s adolescent romanticism swung wildly out of control. But Waters’ view of the freedom is ambiguous. The novel never entirely busts out of its own conventions, out of melodrama’s insistence that true passion must be forbidden and lead to catastrophe. Readers who follow her work will surely find this novel more sober and less piquant than her earlier ones.

Still, “The Night Watch” has an arresting dignity; only people who are truly trapped by circumstances have access to tragedy. And some of the problems here are eternal, such as Helen’s obsessive jealousy and her despair that her lover will never grasp “how utterly dreadful it was to have that seething, wizened little gnome-like thing spring up … how exhausting, to have to tuck it back into your breast when it was done, how frightening, to feel it there, living inside you, waiting its chance to spring again.” “The Night Watch” is full of set pieces like this, scenes of keen emotional agony, of Kay’s surreal expeditions into the war-maimed city, of Vivien’s inability to shake off her doomed infatuation, that are exquisitely pulled off but never ostentatious or precious. There’s no camp here, no overstylized Kabuki drama.

The London Kay speeds through in her ambulance after the raids seems transformed: everyday objects like toilets and ironing boards become unrecognizable, stately homes are reduced to piles of rubble, the boundaries between inside and outside are breached, leaving the intimate world of a family kitchen exposed to the street. But there are far more tenacious structures in the world inhabited by Waters’ characters — invisible, implacable ones. What the war did was not demolish those structures, but make it possible for people to glimpse, amid the chaos and the carnage, the possibility of a life without them.

What’s really surprising about “Christ the Lord” is that it’s pretty good, even if you aren’t keen on Rice’s tediously good-looking, well-dressed and filthy rich vampires, and even if you’re not a believer. Rice’s vampire novels — initially a pleasingly ambitious, agreeably lush and atmospheric sector of popular entertainment, the perfect rainy-day diversion for the brooding adolescent who still lurks in most of us — had grown baggy and bombastic. Their author became so keen on proving her gravitas that her formidable skills as a storyteller gave way before endless passages of metaphysical chest-beating.

The paradox of the literary form we call the novel, however, is that it discovers the sublime by zeroing in on the material realities of often ordinary human lives. Profundity can’t be reached, novelistically, through the front door. Of course popular fiction isn’t known for its subtlety, which is why Rice’s strenuous efforts to demonstrate her seriousness were precisely what relegated her to the mass-market paperback racks. There she found many, many readers who like their Big Questions served straight up, with a dash of homoeroticism.

The restrictions Rice imposed on herself in the first volume of “Christ the Lord” have resulted in what is surely the most literary of her books, and all because she is forced to abandon her customary efforts to be “literary.” “Out of Egypt” is the story of a 7-year-old Hebrew boy living in first-century Palestine and unaware of his momentous destiny, and it is told in his appealingly simple voice. Gone are such Ricean devices as passages of florid description, conspicuous high-end consumption, endless assurances of the main characters’ beauty, and that odd, pseudo-archaic Germanic syntax that would later become a trademark of Yoda. (Pretentious it was.)

Having selected the “greatest story ever told,” Rice can refrain from insisting on its greatness. Instead, she focuses her considerable energy on historical research. (The novel’s more typically grandiose author’s note details her sources and her quarrels with various modern strains of biblical scholarship.) The Jesus, or Yeshua, who narrates “Out of Egypt” is part of an extended Hebrew family, traveling, living and worshiping amid a perpetual mob of aunts, uncles, cousins and second cousins, who strive to shield him from the haze of rumors surrounding his birth.

Rice’s Jesus is deeply and thoroughly Jewish, a student of the famous scholar Philo in Alexandria before his family returns to Nazareth. Without belaboring her research, Rice shows us what these people ate (“a thick pottage of lentils and soft cooked beans and pepper and spices”), the kind of houses they lived in (dirt floors, whitewashed walls, roofs of mud and branches), how they slept (on mats in groups, women and children in one room, men in another, and everyone in the courtyards on hot nights), what their work was like (Joseph, the leader of the clan, being, of course, a carpenter).

The family is buffeted by civil conflicts between the heirs of Herod — a Jewish tyrant installed by the Roman Empire — and Jewish rebels, a war that will be brutally resolved by the Romans. They debate the spiritual philosophies of the ascetic, desert-dwelling Essenes (to which Jesus’ cousin John the Baptist is sent) and the meticulous Pharisees. They discuss the finer points of the reconstruction of the mikvah, or ritual bath, in the crumbling family home in Nazareth. (Fed by rainwater from a cistern, the mikvah must contain a tiny outlet so that the water is always technically running and therefore “living.”) It is the humble intimacy and domesticity of these scenes that gives “Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt” the pulse of life.

Granted, readers more accustomed to and enamored of the broadly drawn lifestyles of the rich and undead in Rice’s previous works may find all this a bit slow. However, the meticulous attention in “Out of Egypt” to the way faith and communal bonds permeate every aspect of Jesus’ family life makes for a far more persuasive picture of spirituality than the operatic agonies of Lestat and his immortal friends. Even the nearly unbearable expectation Jesus feels as, amid a crowd of pilgrims, he approaches Jerusalem’s great temple for the first time is a more palpable depiction of the effects of group psychology than the overblown rock concerts in Rice’s earlier books.

There is, of course, the question of Jesus’ not-so-secret identity, the revelation of which becomes the mystery that drives the novel’s plot. The book’s opening scenes refer to events from apocryphal scripture — in which Jesus inadvertently kills and then resurrects a playmate and animates a set of clay pigeons — but Rice manages to postpone Jesus’ discovery of his exact nature until the novel’s end. As a result, “Out of Egypt” can be read as a riff on one of the oldest stories in human history, predating even Christianity itself: the scion of royal blood raised as a commoner. It’s Harry Potter and “The Sword in the Stone” and “Oedipus Rex” all over again. Throughout this installment of the series, at least, preaching about the significance of Jesus’ situation can be deferred.

It’s entirely possible that the later books in the series will grow too pious for the non-Christian to enjoy. (The low-key approach shown here is not, after all, a Ricean signature.) Not that this will matter much to the series’ success in our God-haunted nation. In fact, if Rice can overcome her reputation as a purveyor of gothic perversity she’s likely to find a whole new contingent of fervent fans among the abundant ranks of America’s devout. Of course, they will expect her to publicly repent of what they will regard as the wicked, wicked ways of her past — something the imperious Rice will surely never do. That should make for a fascinating impasse, a spectacle of the kind Rice herself would never invent (too complicated and ironic), but in its own way, a superior entertainment.

The crowds that make up the march sometimes have wills of their own. Early on, a Union general forbears telling his soldiers not to trash a plantation house, knowing that “in the great mass of men that was an army, strange currents of willfulness and self-expression flowed within the structure of military discipline … Even the generals issued orders for the sake of the record only.” Still, the march hasn’t really got a mind, and therefore it never quite qualifies as a protagonist.

As a result, “The March” lacks a central consciousness for the story to constellate around. In a way, it’s not quite a novel, and if you come to it expecting a novel’s pleasures, you’re likely to be disappointed. Better to think of this book as a Flemish painting, something replete with the allegorical significance of forward movement, like Hieronymus Bosch’s “Haywain,” in which worldly life is depicted as an overstuffed cart from which everyone is trying to grab his or her handful, oblivious to the fact that the journey is taking them from Paradise to Hell. Doctorow hasn’t got Bosch’s hankering for apocalyptic moralizing, though, so the tone is closer to Bruegel; the novel’s wide field is studded here and there with pairs of characters, little incidents and moments, none given more weight than any other.

The march breeds metaphors like a snake sheds skins: It can stand for war itself, for history, for change, for time. You can spend a lot of time pondering these metaphors, but they have the same relation to the march Doctorow depicts as the empty, papery skins have to a handful of solid, squirming snake. Wisely, the author doesn’t attempt to point out that this is a novel of ideas. Instead, he makes it a novel of scenes, a pageant that flits from one character’s experience of the march to another’s, and mostly refrains from comment. It chafes a little to have to surrender a particularly appealing character or interesting situation when the march moves on, but that’s the point; there’s always a new one bringing up the rear.

The characters include not only the march’s leader, Sherman, and his leaders, Grant and Lincoln, but grunts and generals and camp followers. Wrede Sartorius, a German-born doctor who also appears in Doctorow’s “The Waterworks,” cold-bloodedly perfects the art of surgery on the battlefield and predicts the medical advances to come. (He’s one of the few characters who doesn’t dread the future.) The daughter of a Georgian judge becomes, for a while, his helpmeet and lover. A young girl, a freed slave with pale skin, tries to puzzle out her own identity, dressing as a boy and passing as white. Two hard-luck confederate deserters keeping changing uniforms to save the skins underneath them. A randy Northern general treats the South like his own personal erotic candy box. And so on.

It must be said that the black characters in “The March” are too uniformly noble, and this has the counterintuitive effect of depriving them of the stature of the flawed whites. The war is a mixture of grandeur and degradation, and only the characters who have sounded its depths seem to have fully grasped their experience. We see the last of Sherman as he reproaches himself for longing for the march and its “bestowal of meaning to the very ground trod upon, how it made every field and swamp and river into something of moral consequence.” This just before he acknowledges that the meaning he craves is fleeting at best: “our civil war, the devastating manufacture of the bones of our sons, is but a war after a war, a war before a war.”

Our next pick: A misshapen boy-man, a “Pig Palace” and a girl named Holly

Granted, this is a vampire story, of which there are surely already too many, but “The Historian” eschews the extravagant gore and even more extravagant pose-striking of the modern vampire novel. It’s a multigenerational mystery about the search for the tomb of the medieval Wallachian (not Transylvanian!) tyrant Vlad Tepes (the real-life Dracula), conducted by a handful of historians who become convinced he is still alive — or, rather, undead. The main narrator is an unnamed 16-year-old girl, whose father initiates her into the cause when she discovers a mysterious book — blank save for a woodcut of a rampant dragon, hidden in their library.

“The Historian” isn’t especially scary (though Kostova can work up a respectable miasma of dread when needed), and it lacks the inane but breathless chase scenes of “The Da Vinci Code,” but for the sophisticated reader it’s a fine Bordeaux to Dan Brown’s overcaffeinated Diet Coke. Essentially a languorous gothic travelogue, the novel whisks its readers to a series of off-the-package-tour European locales (Ljubljana, anyone?) during the 1930s, ’50s and ’70s, when the Carpathian Mountains — Dracula’s home turf — seemed as wild and remote as the Andes.

Kostova has a genius for evoking places without making you wade through paragraphs of description. The “fluttering hush” of the Carpathian forests, the chaotic streets of Istanbul, a cryptic ritual dance in a Bulgarian village unchanged in hundreds of years — all impress themselves on the reader almost as vividly as actual memories. Perhaps the most uncanny sensation the book gave me came when I looked up pictures of Poenari, the ruins of Dracula’s mountaintop fortress, where one character spends a very unsettled night, and realized it seemed as familiar as a place I’d visited myself, due to the power of Kostova’s evocation.

“The Historian” also imparts a sense of how real historians work (sifting through archives of ancient ledgers to find that crucial and revealing letter, etc.) and of a sizable chunk of Central Europe’s ravaged past as a borderland between Christendom and the encroaching Ottoman Empire. (Dracula was a famous Turk-killer, as well as the slaughterer, through various ghastly, sadistic means, of some 20,000 of his own people.) Kostova even adds a few nice little multicultural addenda to vampire lore, like reporting that Muslim prayer beads work as effectively as a crucifix in fending off the fiends.

The creepiest secret unearthed by the girl narrator of “The Historian” does bear a certain resemblance to the shocking revelation in “The Da Vinci Code.” The big difference is that, unlike Brown’s nattering cardboard people, by the end of Kostova’s novel, the girl and the mother she lost as an infant have also become people worth caring about, tragic figures enmeshed with a treacherous past. That makes “The Historian” a thriller in more ways than one.

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