A forensic psychologist who has been studying false confessors disappears, and each of his case studies steps forward to claim responsibility for the abduction. The Ministry of Irony, an ironic forecasting service, becomes involved in the case when it is revealed that one of its newest clients is also one of the missing doctor's patients. The novel's narrator, a low-level clerk at the Ministry, ignores the advice of his employer, who maintains that fates should be left for irony to determine, not the police, and begins to take an active interest in the case. His efforts to solve the mystery, relying on nothing more than a finely honed sense of irony, lead him into greater and greater complications, until he finds himself enmeshed in an investigation that threatens to implicate no one other than himself

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