I drew a diagram.

On the back of an envelope, in the first thirty pages: the names, the departments, who reported to whom, which of them had been abroad and when. I recommend doing the same. The book won't hold your hand and it is a better book for that, but there are eleven men to keep straight and four of them are called by two names apiece.

The construction is what I admired. It is an investigation conducted almost entirely by interview, so the thing is really a series of rooms with two men in each of them, and the plot advances by what one of them lets slip. Very little happens. Everything moves. The load is carried by the conversations, which means every one of them has to be doing structural work, and they are.

The Prideaux material is the strongest and it is placed exactly where the middle of the book would otherwise sag.

Nine. I was in my twenties when this world was supposedly running, and I've never worked anywhere with that quantity of dishonesty in it, though I did once work somewhere with a little, and the small version is recognisable enough to make the large one convincing.