Lord Peregrine Finch believes that every mystery can be solved by careful observation, precise reasoning, and the disciplined avoidance of assumptions.

Whitehall is about to test that belief.

A confidential government memorandum has vanished. The folder remains. The offices were secure. Everyone involved insists they followed procedure. Unfortunately, nobody seems able to agree on what the procedure actually was.

As Peregrine investigates, he finds a Permanent Secretary with a motive, a Parliamentary Under-Secretary with a fictitious engagement, a junior clerk using government cipher paper for entirely private purposes, a minister slipping through service corridors, and an umbrella that appears to have travelled farther through Whitehall than anyone is willing to admit.

The evidence is real. The secrets are real.

The conspiracy, however, may be another matter entirely.

In The Minister and the Missing Memorandum, Lord Peregrine Finch returns in a comic mystery of bureaucratic absurdity, institutional evasions, misplaced certainty, and one investigator who is very often correct about the facts and considerably less reliable about what they mean.