This looming threat is what forms the plot of Barbara Shenouda's "The Balkan Secret Conspiracy" - a grand plot which, unfortunately, it never quite comes to fruition. Unlike novels such as Frederick Forsyth's "The Odessa File," which skillfully weave Nazi conspiracy into present-day, "The Balkan Secret Conspiracy" is a frequently awkward tale that promises far more than it can deliver.

The book starts off with a strong introduction covering Zlata's difficult childhood and her homeland’s tension, but loses velocity as soon as the main story begins. It feels less like a narrative and more like a list of details, going through the actions and visions of characters in a writing style that borders on monotone. It also doesn’t help that there are several issues with tense, frequent shifts from past to present that should have been caught in editing.

Though there are some style issues, the main problem comes in an excess of details. Shenouda clearly wants to tell the story of each character, but her attentions are spent too much on secondary characters and not enough on the major ones. I appreciated some of the background, but for the main plot there is no reason why we need three pages on the alcoholism of a police chief's wife or more than one murder Zlata's psychic friend researched.

Shenouda spends so much time on these little details that the main plot of the book suffers, especially when the conspiracy broadens to include occult rituals undertaken on the part of former Nazi officials. It's a plausible inclusion on the surface - history has proved Hitler was intrigued by the supernatural - but its introduction is heavy-handed at best, introducing magic with no real transition from reality. It tips the story and detracts whatever attention the earlier chapters captured.