The Rule of Four

Set on the Princeton campus during Easter weekend in 1999, this story involves four Princeton seniors getting ready for graduation who set out to solve the mystery contained within an extremely rare and mysterious book, the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, an incunabulum published in 1499 in Venice. It is a complex allegorical work written in a modified Italian language frequently interspersed with material from other languages as well as its anonymous author's own made-up words. The New York Times Book Review calls The Rule of Four "the ultimate puzzle book." It has been positively compared to the Da Vinci Code, and received an aggregate score of 74 out of 100 (based on 17 reviews) on the review aggregator Metacritic.