The concept was fantastic and interesting. I thought the prose was not bad (as opposed to Dan Brown, as long as you're comparing them). I enjoyed the historical research that went into the story.

What I didn't like, however, were a lot of other things that kept me from enjoying the book fully, namely:

1. The Ottoman Empire is portrayed as a positive institution when in fact, its depredations of the Christian peoples of the Balkans was so brutal that figures like Dracula were folk heroes in Romania (rather, Vlad ?epe? was in his historical, non-vampiric persona).

2. Orthodox Christians are, contrastingly, portrayed in a negative light.

3. The pacing of the book is terrible, particularly at the end where Dracula is killed quickly and without much drama. There is also virtually no drama when the book shifts from being what could be a story like Foucault's Pendulum where the whole premise of the story is a hoax, to being a horror story with a real vampire in it. The shock of that moment could have been handled better.

4. I don't understand why the author chose to "hide" the names of real places in the book, like Ljubljana in Slovenia or Dubrovnik in Croatia. That may have been the rage in early Nineteenth Century novels where Prince N-y goes to B-g province to the town of A-ia, but since roughly 1875 most people usually name places easily. It was easy enough to decode that it should have just been said.