Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Douglas Adams is the inspired maniac who created the BBC's cult classic "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" and who wrote many of the wittiest episodes of "Dr. Who." In this hilarious novel, he continues the same combination of satire, pure silliness, paradox and ersatz New Age cosmology. As a reader, he benefits from a pleasant, expressive voice and an authentic appreciation of the author's (i.e., his own) overtones. Most listeners will forgive his lack of comic timing, which derails some of his jokes, for the ones that survive will delight the silly savants for whom he writes. Y.R. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine

Like the author's classic HITCHIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY, this zany novel imaginatively combines science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and trendy philosophy into a risible and thought-provoking brew. Unlike HITCHHIKER, which Adams first cast as a serialized audio play and then novelized, GENTLY first appeared as a novel, which noted British writer/producer Dirk Maggs has dramatized for audio. It concerns the first important case of "holistic" gumshoe Dirk Gently, who encounters time-travel, space aliens, ghosts, an electric monk, and poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, among other weirdnesses, as he and his cohorts save humanity from oblivion. Maggs has deftly restructured the book for dramatic purposes and paced it to keep the listener ever alert to the abrupt, lightening-fast transitions. Sound, music, and voices are expertly textured. Y.R. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award (c) AudioFile 2009, Portland, Maine