Andrew's mother, Cartell's ex-wife Désirée, visits briefly; she announces she is throwing a party that evening.

Constance says that people who overemphasize this are hiding something; Cartell says he knows someone who forged their name in a parish register to embellish their ancestry but has never been exposed.

Désirée, producing one, suggests it shows that Period has dementia, because it mentions a conversation about his family's antiquity that she doesn't remember.

Period has adopted the middle name "Pyke" to make it appear he belongs to an extinct gentry family; Cartell had discovered this.

Alleyn feels that if Leiss or Moppett had murdered Cartell they would not have advertised their presence in the lane by whistling, or that Désirée would have done this by shouting.

As she worked on it, she found it becoming "a kind of comedy of manners with very little crime";[2] similarly, she said in an interview, "male snobs have always fascinated me.

[4] Anthony Boucher, reviewing in The New York Times, felt that though "highly readable and entertaining" the novel was not Marsh's best: "The genteel dissection of levels of snobbery in the English country gentry is, to me at least, less interesting than her usual themes, and Superintendent Roderick Alleyn has handled more cleanly defined murder puzzles.

Julian Symons in The Sunday Times called Hand in Glove "neat, dexterous... Miss Marsh's freshest and most enjoyable performance for years".

[7] In a capsule review for The Sunday Telegraph, Cecil Day-Lewis under his crime-fiction pseudonym "Nicholas Blake" summed the book up as "Clever and cosy.

"[8] Francis Iles in The Guardian called it "Light, entertaining and disastrously readable: that is, if you have anything else you ought to be doing", praising the "easy, natural dialogue and gentle humour".

"[10] Like Boucher, Marsh scholar Kathryne Slate McDorman sees snobbery and class distinctions as a major theme of the book, noting that even Period's servants are particularly conservative.

[11] Bruce Harding similarly calls it "a civilized and witty send-up of a male English snob and the class insecurities that beset Britain", though he does comment that Andrew and Nicola's courtship "seems oddly Edwardian in the racy 1960s".

[12] BBC One broadcast an adaptation for the television series The Inspector Alleyn Mysteries, with John Gielgud guest-starring, on 11 January 1994.

[13] The adaptation inserts Alleyn's wife Agatha Troy into the plot as a sleuth and has her surviving an attempt on her life.