Dirk Gently

With business far from booming, Dirk and MacDuff style themselves as holistic security consultants and return to the university that expelled Dirk for cheating twenty years earlier.

Dirk and MacDuff return to Cambridge, to the university that expelled Dirk for cheating 20 years ago.

They have been employed by Dirk's former professor as security consultants to guard a valuable robot. However, within hours of their arrival the robot is stolen and the professor found dead, with Dirk and MacDuff implicated as the chief suspects.

The professor was the only person who ever believed in Dirk, who vows to find out who is behind the murder. The chief suspects are Emelda Ransome, the brilliant but embittered computer scientist who has spent the whole of her career developing a fully functioning Artificial Intelligence, and David Cho, the Chinese programmer recently arrived from Beijing to help Emelda complete her experiment.

Macduff's girlfriend Susan is also in Cambridge at an interview for a new job which, if she got it, would mean the end of Dirk and MacDuff's detective partnership.