Kate was at Heathrow with plans to fly to Norway. The man in front of her at the ticket counter proved to be a massively built though apparently dull-witted fellow and not owning a credit card to book his flight. Growing increasingly frustrated, Kate offered to buy his ticket. Then it turned out he didn't have a passport. No sooner had she abandoned her trip to Norway than Heathrow exploded!
Dirk Gently slept through the urgent ringing of his phone. Eventually, the repeated phone calls ended and he was able to slip back into a pleasant sleep. When he finally awoke, he realized that he was late for an appointment with a paying client! That explained the phone ringing! How to explain his lateness and still get paid? He made his way to the client's home and was troubled to see so many police cars parked out front. His client was inexplicably dead in a basement locked from the inside. Suicide? Unlikely. His decapitated head was sitting on the record player. The situation was clearly impossible, which was just the sort of mystery Dirk liked. If only he had a paying client.
Odin, the All Father of the Norse Gods, has retired to a mental hospital where his linen sheets are changed frequently and he lives in comfort. Annoyingly, Thor had demanded a challenge in Valhalla, which was going to interrupt Odin's joyous retirement. Yes, it turns out that the gods still exist though they have not adapted to the modern world. Most of them are tramps wandering the streets. In fact, until very recently, Odin had been one such tramp, but he sold off the power of the gods for a clean bed and fresh linens.
Dirk proves to be a hapless oaf, a man who puts immense effort into avoiding small tasks until they became insurmountable. The most obvious example of this was his fear of opening his refrigerator for discovering what might have become of the contents. It hadn't been opened in months and his cleaning lady had likewise avoided opening the refrigerator. Funny? Not really. He was so determined not to open it that he bought a new refrigerator and had the old one hauled away, unopened. In the course of the day, he managed to get his nose broken, his hand clawed by an eagle, twist an ankle jumping out of a window, rip his coat, crash his car twice, and get run over by a motorbike. Is this an effort at slapstick? Dirk was quirky and mysterious in the last book, here he is mostly an idiot who literally crashes into the solution to his questions.
Thor is a lot of fun. He is full of godly fury and has an epic temper-tantrum to clear his mind. He's usually gruff and laconic, but his interactions with Kate are fun. His punishment of having to count all the stones on the beaches of Wales was rather funny, especially when he refused to say how many. "Count them yourself!"
As for the mystery, it really isn't explained. Like in the last book, Dirk's great solution - if there was such - takes place off screen. What happened to get Odin back to his linens and Thor on his way to Norway? The end is very abrupt and unsatisfying.
Skip.
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