The Rule of Four is a Mystery thriller / Academic thriller novel written by Ian Caldwell and Dustin Thomason. It supposed to be  DaVinci Code type novel but authors have failed doing so.

When four Princeton seniors begin the Easter weekend, they are more concerned with their plans for the next year and an upcoming dance than with a 500-year-old literary mystery. But by the end of the holiday, two people are dead, two of the students are injured, and one has disappeared. These events, blended with Renaissance history, code breaking, acrostics, sleuthing, and personal discovery, move the story along at a rapid pace. Tom Sullivan, the narrator, tells of his late father’s and then a roommate’s obsession with the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a 15th-century “novel” that has long puzzled scholars. Paul has built his senior thesis on an unpopular theory posited by Tom’s father–that the author was an upper-class Roman rather than a monk–and has come close to proving it. While much of the material on the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili is arcane and specialized, it is clearly explained and its puzzles are truly puzzling, while the present-day action is compelling enough to keep teens reading.

Story was some what interesting and I read till the end But I know many has given up after few chapters. The authors were far out of their league but since it’s their first novel, and these two writers are very young. Some of the passages have merit. It will be interesting to watch them mature as writers. Out of  1,185  Amazon customers 404 have given a single star and 272 have given 2 stars as rating. So you can see what readers think about it.