What do a lost cat, a time traveler, a software engineer, a stuck sofa, and an Electric Monk have in common?  Well, it's hard to say unless you read Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency. Then it becomes clear -- almost. Adams' style, first shown to the world in his Hitchhiker's Guide series of books, is hard to describe.  Not because it crosses many genre boundaries but because it's hard to make words like irreverent, zany, witty, and clever combine in such a way as to give an accurate picture.  It's best just to read the books. But be warned, if you have even the smallest of religious bones in your body, be sure to wear your thick skin while reading this book.  His pokes at religion and belief systems are not mean-spirited but could be irritating if you're not expecting it.

Holistic revolves around a few events that seem at first unrelated.  An Electric Monk on a strange planet finds himself travelling through a door that he finds embedded in the side of a large rock.  This isn't an ordinary Electric Monk however, it's malfunctioning.  A brand new sofa is stuck halfway up a staircase.  The delivery men could only get it up to the first landing and then couldn't negotiate the turns.  When they tried to take the couch back downstairs they couldn't negotiate the turns going down either.  It was stuck.  The president of Britain's leading software company is murdered as a random event.  No suspects and no evidence.  A software engineer finds himself climbing up the outside of an apartment building to burglarize his girlfriend's flat for no good reason.  A salt shaker is found embedded in a 200 year old clay pot.   A college professor finds a horse in his bathroom.

The cleverness of Adams is that he pulls this all together.  At the end of the book all of the strange events are linked together following a sound logical progression.  Like any good science fiction, a couple known rules are broken or reinterpreted to create an alternate reality and in this reality it all makes sense.

Perhaps Douglas Adams is most well known for his Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy series.  In those  books he demonstrates a talent for irreverence, lunacy, and just strange silliness -- but in a weird sort of way.  He continues this tradition in Holistic.

Adams fans will likely enjoy the book quite a bit.  New comers to Adams will either love it or hate it.