Two quirky detective stories from Britain''s best sci-fi writer and author of The Hitch Hiker''s Guide to the Galaxy: Douglas Adams.

Dirk Gently is a detective - well, a sort of detective. There is a long and honourable tradition of great detectives and Dirk Gently does not belong to it. Dirk Gently calls himself a ''holistic detective'' and above all, he believes in ''the interconnectedness of all things''. Sherlock Holmes observed that once you have eliminated the impossible, then whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth. Dirk Gently, however, does not like to eliminate the impossible.

In Dirk Gently''s Holistic Detective Agency a simple search for a missing cat reveals two ghosts, a dodo, an Electric Monk, the devastating secret that lies behind the whole of human history and threatens to bring it to a premature close, and, finally, the utterly terrifying reason why Richard MacDuff has had a sofa stuck on his stairs for three weeks.

As The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul opens, a passenger check-in desk at Heathrow Airport shoots up through the roof engulfed in a ball of orange flames. The usual people try to claim responsibility. However, no rational cause can be found for the explosion - it was simply designated an act of God. But, thinks Dirk Gently, which God? And why? What God would be hanging around Terminal Two of Heathrow Airport trying to catch the 15.37 to Oslo?

In these two delightfully odd detective stories, Adams explores once again the realm of the unknown, in the style of science fiction that brought him fame with The Hitch Hiker''s Guide to the Galaxy.