crux of the matter-in-hand

Sentence Stimulus

Now to the crux of the matter-in-hand:

Observations

The NMC has 204 hits for crux.

There are 27 hits for crux of the matter and as the corpus reveals it is almost always with is on the left or the right, as the screen shot on the far right shows. The other words that follow crux are rhetorical notions.

There is no matter-in-hand. There are 16 hits for matter in hand, not hyphenated, 15 of which are followed by punctuation as can be seen in the screen shot below. How many follow crux?