While his cleaning lady languishes unheard in a locked fridge on a rubbish skip outside his front door, Dirk Gently, nursing a bloodied and broken nose, is vainly attempting to connect random clues.

Simon and Cynthia Draycott, a sinister couple in the advertising business are somehow connected with the murder of his client, the record executive Geoff Ansty. While Dirk is on the right track - a track which is helpfully flagged by the purchase of an I-Ching pocket calculator and a chance encounter with a certain Nurse Sally Mills - he does not realise is that the American journalist Kate Schechter is also on their trail - or rather, on the trail of one of their victims, Thor, the God Of Thunder.

While Thor is superglued to a warehouse floor by the evil goblin Toe Rag, with Dirk's ex-secretary Miss Pearce in attendance in the form of a vending machine under a particularly strange curse, Kate visits the Clinic where Thor's destitute father Odin plans to end his days. Odin has traded his immortal soul for a clean bed and 24-hour nursing care under the motherly eye of Sister Bailey at the Woodshead, a rather suspicious and eerie institution run by the peculiar Dr Standish and owned by the Draycotts.

Just as it looks like Kate and Dirk will never join forces, Dirk's Holistic Navigation system - which consists of following cars that look as if they know where they are going - brings both Holistic Detective and lovelorn American Journalist together. Meanwhile Thor goes for help looking for the one person in the past few days who has been kind to him - a Miss Kate Schechter, who gave him her address shortly before Heathrow Terminal 5 developed a very brief but sudden micro-climate of the thunderous variety.