Net of Cobwebs

Net of Cobwebs is the story of Malcolm Drake, a merchant seaman struggling back from the shock of a disastrous voyage. On the surface, he could have found no more perfect refuge than his brother’s comfortable, well-run, suburban home. Everyone wanted to help Malcolm, to soothe him, to quiet him. His beautiful, rather delicate sister-in-law, Helene, who thought no price too high to pay for well-bred respectability. Her sister, Virginia, who thought she had a right to fit everything on earth into her own plans. And Aunt Evie, lovely, sweet Aunt Evie, whose only passion was to bring Joy.

Very pleasant people, nice people, yet among them stifling Malcolm in the quicksand of their implacable sweetness, so that when murder happened, he had no defence against it. Aunt Evie was dead; she had willed Malcolm a small fortune. Poor Malcolm, they said gently, so often he didn’t really know what he was doing. That awful thing that had happened to him on his ship, you know. Not insane, of course-oh, no, nothing like that-but perhaps a bit . . . well, so often he didn’t really know what he was doing.

And Malcolm really began to believe it. The smothering net of cobwebs bound him tighter and tighter to his helpless fears. Maybe he had done it. Maybe he had put that extra fatal dose of whiskey into Aunt Evie’s glass. Maybe he’d better stop stammering his innocence and relax into the comfortable, awful web of protected guilt they were weaving for him.

But he couldn’t relax. He had to know. He had to claw his way out to the world he had once known, where murder was a deliberate crime and not an unpleasant accident, a crime for which a man could pay. The reader is so breathlessly absorbed in Malcolm’s fight that even the beautifully woven murder plot takes second place in his interest.

Thus, in Net of Cobwebs, Mrs. Holding has once again written a psychological crime novel as shocking as only people can be.