The Lady of the Shroud

Starts with boy meets vampire, boy loses vampire, boy gets....
Well, I don't want to ruin the first part of the story which is quite good.. Stoker should have quit while he was ahead in the same tone of his other "horror" tales.
Instead this turns into a discourse on the superiority of the "British Race," whose expetise is necessary to save the noble, but less developed, citizens of the world from evildoers north or west of the Balkans. It does portend WW I, the war to end all wars.
I had to speed read the last part of the novel just to say I finished the book.
I suggest reading the first part of the book, read the last part at your own risk.

An interesting read in its level of detail, the work is somewhat exaggerated in its depiction of the hero/protagonist. Whether to call it a love story, a work of military or political fiction I do not know. It contains elements of all three in equal proportion with an undertone of fantasy, which is similar to another work by the same author, Dracula.

The level of detail regarding military function was at times tiresome; although it would possibly be of great interest to those with a passion for the details of war machines.

In truth, the work could have ended at the halfway mark after the climax of the first mystery, which I won't give away, was resolved. It would have been a much stronger narrative. The plot that followed weakened the overall storyline.