The story of Kermit's adventures as a young frog. Having spent all their lives in the swamp, Kermit and his friends Goggles and Croaker dream of heading out into the big wide world, but never gather enough courage to make it happen. When they finally do head out, chased by a mean old bullfrog called Blotch, Goggles and Croaker are quickly captured and sold for use in a school. It is now up to Kermit to locate his friends, find out what happens to frogs in schools, and then attempt a daring rescue.

Detective fiction is usually thought of as genre fiction, a vast group of works bound together by their use of a common formula. But, as Peter Thoms argues in his investigation of some of the most important texts in the development of detective fiction in the nineteenth century, the very works that establish the genre's formulaic structure also subvert that structure. "Detection and Its Designs" reads early detective fiction as a self-conscious form that is suspicious of the detective it ostensibly celebrates, and critical of the authorial power he wields in attempting to reconstruct the past and script a narrative of the crime.
In readings of Godwin's "Caleb Williams," Poe's Dupin stories, Dickens's "Bleak House," Collins's "The Moonstone," and Doyle's "The Hound of the Baskervilles," Thoms argues that the detective's figurative writing emerges out of a desire to exert control over others and sometimes over himself.
"Detection and Its Designs" demonstrates that, far from being a naive form, early detective fiction grapples with the medium of storytelling itself. To pursue these inward-turning fictions is to uncover the detective's motives of controlling the representation of both himself and others, a discovery that in turn significantly undermines the authority of his solutions.

Author of such feats of storytelling as The Woman in White and The Moonstone, Wilkie Collins has traditionally been recognized far more than for his accomplishments as a serious novelist. In this study of The Moonstone, Peter Thoms argues for a new appreciation of this early master of detection and intrigue. Plotting in Collins, Thoms contends, represents much more than the skillful carpentry of the novelist: It constitutes the essential drama of the major novels themselves, as protagonists struggle for control of the stories in which they find themselves embedded. \u201cMr. Thoms' scholarly contribution is in recognizing an important constructive quality in Collins' evident fascination with intricate and intriguing plotting. Other critics, he says, have tended to single out Collins' plots as indications of his superficiality as a writer. Mr. Thoms' study does, in fact, demonstrate that there is much more to Collins' elaborate plots than the delights of suspense and detection. So his main claim is justified in that he increases our respect for the ramifications of Collins' story-telling techniques.\u201d -John R. Reed The Windings of the Labyrinth asserts that the structures of Collins's major novels possess surprising sophistication - that each of these novels elaborates a quest for identity, and that this quest for a personal story is intimately tied to the emergence of the novel's structure. In reappraising Collins's achievement, Thoms has written an accessible study that will be of interest no only to Victorian scholars, readers of Collins, and students of detective fiction but to anyone interested in the relationship between a novel's plot and its meaning.