Torre Nilsson's unique blend of Buñuel-like perversity and baroque imagination is evident in Hand in the Trap, an involuted mystery with gothic overtones. The title is taken from a passage by St. Augustine to the effect that he who puts his hand in a trap will carry that trap around with him forever. A young girl pays a visit to a spinster aunt and discovers that another of her aunts has been living there in total seclusion ever since she was jilted by her fiancé twenty years before. The girl decides to bring about a reconciliation and tracks down the former lover, who is now a wealthy family man. Her detective work backfires in the course of a number of ironic plot twists.