Her new cabbie, who goes by 'Bobby,' takes her to the police station, which sets the pair off on a strange odyssey through the Bulgarian countryside, searching for Lazarov's relatives. When her cab driver drops her at the wrong hotel, she has a brief encounter with an elderly couple and winds up holding their satchel - which holds an urn labeled as the remains of a man named Stoyan Lazarov.

The Shadow Land opens in 2008, as a young American woman named Alexandra Boyd arrives in Sofia to teach English.

(It's important to note that Kostova was not on a whirlwind weekend holiday she went to Bulgaria to study its folksongs. Some readers will already know that Kostova first visited Bulgaria in 1989, where she met her husband Georg Kostov. Happily, Kostova has found that something else in her new book, The Shadow Land, in which she returns to the Eastern European terrain of The Historian - but this time it's not a fictional landscape based on tales of Dracula, it's the real topography of present-day Bulgaria. I could sense it somewhere not far off, but it didn't yet exist. However, both novels lacked something else - a sense of grounding and purpose. In 2010, her sophomore effort, The Swan Thieves, thrilled me slightly less, but made up for its lack of suspense with a delicate dance through the world of fine art. In 2005, I read a book so suspenseful, so laden with longing that I could not put it down: The Historian, by Elizabeth Kostova. Your purchase helps support NPR programming.

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