Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

Let me get it straight: the ending is very Adamsian. I have an unsubstantiated feeling (one could say "a belief") that Douglas Adams never cared much about the endings.

The reason I'm giving it my favorite 4.5 is the pure joy of Adams capturing so many concepts from what is by now computer science folklore, but at the time of writing the book was on the forefront of software engineering. The book is written in 1987, mind you.

And perhaps that's another reason many gave it three stars. Adams, not unlike his character, really liked to talk about computers in detail.

Douglas Adams is one of the best writers of humorous Science Fiction (which is how I am classifying this, though you could, I suppose, call it Fantasy). The interesting thing is that Dirk Gently does not appear until about the mid-point of the book, though he is mentioned in passing a few times earlier. And what Adams does here is to take a number of bizarre threads and tie them all together into a story that makes a weird kind of sense when it is all done. And Dirk ends up being smarter than you first think. I plan to read the follow-up, Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul.