While Alleyn works in Australia, his artist wife Troy has accepted an invitation from client Hilary Bill-Tasman to spend Christmas at his ancestral home, Halberds.

Troy sees Nigel the under-houseman building an ice sculpture around a large wooden crate outside: Hilary wants a model of his ancestral tomb instead of a snowman.

For Christmas Day, Hilary has planned an elaborate Christmas-tree ceremony for local children, with the colonel heavily disguised as a Santa-like 'Druid' (Cressida, who used to act, will help costume him).

Cressida killed the manservant after discovering her paternity, knowing that the snobbish Hilary would never marry her if he knew her working-class origins, threw Moult's body out of the window while the bells drowned out all other noises, then stood in for the colonel herself.

[6] McDorman sees social satire in the red herring of the servants: "When a murder occurs on the premises... it is easy for all the house guests to conclude immediately that one of the staff has again gratified a blood lust.

Respectable upper-class English folk do not accept that one of their own could commit a heinous crime, especially if there are servants on whom to fix the blame – and Bill-Tasman's are completely vulnerable to such a charge.

Although innocent of the crime, Bill-Tasman, like Percival Pyke Period, contributes to the possibilities for wrongdoing by his single-minded, narrow standard for evaluating worth in others, and ultimately in himself.

"[7] Kathryne Slate McDorman compares the wintry English setting to that of Death and the Dancing Footman, and (although the locale of Tied Up in Tinsel is not specified) suggests that the action takes place in Dorset, as in the earlier book.

[9] Lewis comments that the entertainment Hillary stages for the local families is "an elaborate version of Ngaio's own Christmas parties": "Every Christmas she entertained the children of her friends to an elaborate 'Christmas Tree Party' when she tried to create the atmosphere of an English country house with church bells and carols echoing out into the hot Christchurch summer.

[10][11] Edmund Crispin wrote a mixed review for The Sunday Times: "the killer’s identity comes as a nice surprise, and the writing flows as gracefully as ever.

"[16] The New York Times reviewer called the ex-convict servants "so flagrantly suspect that no reader out of the cradle will believe in their guilt", but added, "I must say that Dame Ngaio had me honestly fooled as to the true murderer and to the way it was done.

"[17] Marsh's biographer Margaret Lewis is not impressed by Tied Up in Tinsel: "The novel is very dated, and hopelessly old-fashioned... a return to the classic thirties style with little to recommend it... Little, Brown were happy to publish, however, and American readers enjoyed its quaint atmosphere.

The difference between the fiction arising from direct and recent experience such as Clutch of Constables and When in Rome and those that depended on out-of-date memories was becoming very apparent.