It's hard not to feel sorry for the hapless Vadassy, roped into a plot, forced to hunt for a spy, a task for which he is woefully unprepared and which he goes about with a bumbling desperation. This is the anthisesis of one of those books where a clever slueth probes the doings and stories of a series of characters all confined to a single location, eventually, putting the clues together and seeing through the deceptions to finally reveal the culprit. Poor Vadassy acts in a way that probably more closely resembles how the rest of us would act in that situation, completely out of our depth. In the end, the hidden world of espionage and intrigue are larger and nastier than he could ever have imagined.