Author(s): Ian Caldwell

Crime/Thrillers

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 the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, one of the rarest, most complex and most valuable books ever published. Scholars have been attempting to decipher it for five hundred years. Tom's father thought he found the key a few years before he died, but the impenetrable Renaissance text has never been unlocked. Tom's roommate Paul has spent four years working on the Hypnerotomachia, and has finally broken the code. But the night his thesis is due to be handed in, things start to go horribly wrong. A dog is found- its paws burned and shaved- in the steam tunnels that run beneath the campus. Paul's mentor, Richard Curry, has a violent breakdown. And the student entrusted with typing up the thesis is thrown from the clock tower. His hands and feet have been burned- like the dog, he's been brutally tortured- and Paul's thesis is gone. Suddenly it becomes clear that the secrets the book hides are worth killing for.