Product Description

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 most valuable books in the world. Since its publication in 1499, "The Hypnerotomachia Poliphili" has baffled scholars who have tried to understand its many mysteries. Coded in seven languages, the text is at once a passionate love story, an intricate mathematical labyrinth, and a tale of arcane brutality. Paul Harris, Tom's room-mate, has deeply personal reasons of his own for wanting to unveil the secrets the book hides. When a long-lost diary surfaces, it seems the two friends have found the key to the labyrinth - but when a fellow researcher is murdered only hours later, they suddenly find themselves in great danger. And what they discover embedded in the text stuns them: a narrative detailing the passion of a Renaissance prince, a hidden crypt, and a secret worth dying to protect.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #270628 in Books
• Published on: 2005-02-17
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 464 pages

New York Times
‘An extremely erudite thriller’

People Magazine
If you loved The Da Vinci Code - Dive into this

Eve, June 2004
'An engrossing read... you won't be able to put this down'

Customer Reviews

Dreadful
What a pity Savonarola wasn't around to burn the manuscript.

Badly Flawed
From all the positive reviews, I was expecting something special. But it's really not all that good. Horribly paced - most of the book takes place over two days which seem to have more than the usual number of hours. Historically poor - anything you can check is likely to be wrong. Unsophisticated - the writing style is juvenile at best. And, worst of all, the University portrayed is, to English eyes, totally unbelievable.

Two stars for effort but thta's all I can give it.

Intriguing premise, let down by overindulgence
I'd have to echo the sentiments of the other reviewers here. "The Rule of Four" is spouted as a cerebral version of "The Davinci Code", with a writing style of "Dan Brown meets Umberto Eco"

The story is supposed to centre around a very real book - the Hypnerotomachia Pophirii, written by an anonymous author in several different languages, which is reputed to have hidden messages that reveal a centuries-old secret that many have been unable to crack. The book exists, and some of the authors' observations and knowledge of the book are well-informed and intriguing.

However, the Rule of Four, as a story chooses to largely focus away from this very interesting main plotline and the Hypnerotomachia becomes largely sidelined in the process. A wasted opportunity, in my opinion.

Instead, the bulk of the book concentrates on four Princetown Graduate students, and their ups and downs as their final theses are finished, and to add a little spice and interest, a murder is thrown in somewhere, but all in all, although the book is very well-written, and tied up nicely with a plausable ending, it is fairly dull.

The problem is that the authors do not develop anything well enough to make the reader actually care. There is very little mentioned about the Hypnerotomachia to begin with, and the murder (when it happens) is committed, then largely forgotten until the end. The bulk of the book consists of flashbacks involving other dull characters and seem to offer very little to the overall conclusion. Finally, I think I may have been the only other person annoyed with the fact that the narrator speaks in the present tense.

Despite this, when the Rule of Four does focus on the Hypnerotomachia and its history, it is very readable. Later on in the book, as the hypotheses start flowing, and the final conclusion of the reason for the book being written in the first place is fascinating, and very plausable.

OK, I wasn't expecting Dan Brown-esque rooftop chases across Italy, or explosive action-packed scenes involving car chases, cover-ups and double & triple crosses, but I would have liked a bit more in-depth on the subject of the Hypnerotomachia Pophirii instead of Princeton traditions, or the narrator's relationship with his late father and his girlfriend, who are generally side-characters, and not really very necessary to the general plot.