I feel bad giving this book just 2 stars because I like Eoin Colfer so much and he's a very good writer. The problem is that his writing style is very different from Douglas Adams's.

The hitchiker's guide series relies on a lot of absurdist humor and the fact that there is essentially no plot. There's never any resolution, and the good guys never win. Eoin Colfer's books, on the other hand, are great precisely because of how tightly he develops his characters through cohesive, entertaining plots.

So the first 150 pages or so of this book were absolutely dull. I didn't even chuckle until page 93, and the usual Adams plotlessness made the book very hard to read. Towards the end Colfer couldn't help himself, however, and he inserts a genuinely interesting plot. The action books up, the humor gets better, and the last 1/3rd or so of the book was quite enjoyable.

In short: Colfer could clearly have done a much better book if he'd let himself be himself, but he tried to be Adams. And - quite frankly - even Adams himself wasn't very entertaining by the 5th book in the increasingly inaccurately named Hitchhiker's Trilogy.