Includes "An Entomologist's Dictionary" (5 unnumbered pages at the end of the work).

Includes bibliographical references.

Darkus Cuttle has taken care of his father ever since his mother died, but one day his father vanishes from a locked vault at the Natural History Museum, and now he lives with his eccentric uncle--but one day he finds a large and unusually intelligent and self-aware beetle, and soon he and his two friends are caught up in a struggle to protect an intelligent super species of beetles.