Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency

In which there's a teaspoon in the metronome, a salt cellar in the earthenware and a horse in the bathroom.

Detective Sergeant Gilks throws a cordon of police around the flat of Richard MacDuff, prime suspect in the Gordon Way murder case. Richard makes a narrow escape and returns to the offices of Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency, where Dirk Gently puts him under hypnosis to find out what actually happened on the night of the murder.

Richard attended the prestigious Coleridge Dinner at St Cedd's College Cambridge, invited by his old tutor Professor 'Reg' Chronotis, who performed a seemingly impossible magic trick where he broke open a 3000 year-old Greek pot to reveal a St Cedd's salt cellar, the exact same salt cellar that had been standing on the table minutes earlier.

More bizarre events ensued, including a reading of Coleridge's extremely long, weird and tedious poem Kubla Khan, the discovery of a horse in Professor Chronotis's bathroom and Richard's attempt to retrieve an extremely unwise answering machine message he left his girlfriend, Gordon's sister Susan Way by burgling her flat.

Dirk Gently and his assistant Janice Pearce learn much from Richard's recollections under hypnosis but elsewhere events take a bizarre turn as an Electric Monk wanders about the countryside in the region of the crime scene, looking for something to believe in.