THE RULE OF FOUR

Tom Sullivan is about to graduate from Princeton. He''s intelligent and popular, but haunted by the violent death several years earlier of his father, an academic who devoted his life to studying one of the rarest, most complex and valuable books in the world. Coded in seven languages, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is at once a passionate love story, an intricate mathematical labyrinth and a tale of arcane brutality, and has baffled scholars since 1499. Tom''s roommate Paul has reasons of his own for wanting to decipher the old script and when a long-lost diary surfaces, it seems they have found the key to its mysteries. Only hours later, a fellow researcher is murdered and the two friends suddenly find themselves in great danger, working desperately to expose the book''s secret and slowly uncovering a Renaissance tale of passion and blood, a hidden crypt and a secret worth dying to protect...