"It is 1950. London is still reeling from World War II, and Margery Benson--a sensible schoolmarm and lonely spinster--is just trying to get through life. But one day, she reaches her breaking point, abandoning her job and her tidy, circumscribed life, to set out on an expedition to the other side of the world in search of an insect that may or may not exist: the golden beetle of New Caledonia, Margery's childhood obsession ever since her father gave...

Darkus Cuttle has taken care of his father ever since his mother died, but one day his father vanished 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.