Bell, Josephine - A Hole in the Ground (1971)

This is also the title of a book by Andrew Garve.

This late Bell suffers from a problem shared with Gladys Mitchell and Margery Allingham: many of the scenes are excellent, demonstrating fertility and ingenuity, but the same fertility and ingenuity are over - applied to the serious business of plotting, resulting in such tangled webs that their foundation lives up to the book’s title. Thus, although the surprisingly Rendellesque presentation of the two murderous sisters (one of whom the doctor hero is completely taken aback to discover is a lesbian) and the scenes in the Devil’s Well are excellent, the details of the crimes committed twenty years before the main action are impossible to follow, calling for mute acceptance rather than for scrutiny. A pity, for this “crime novel” (as critics would call it) could have been an excellent book with a little more work.

Nick Fuller