Superintendent Charles Wycliffe is spending Christmas with the family of a lawyer friend when one of the local teenage girls goes missing. As a favour, Wycliffe begins to look into the matter, but within days the teenager’s mother is found shot to death, and that is only the beginning of the mysteries piling up…. "Wycliffe and the Quiet Virgin," by W. J. Burley, is the 13th novel in this long-running series, published in 1986. As ever, the Cornish setting plays a central role, in this case particularly the dramatic and changeable weather, and Wycliffe continues to be a thoughtful and interesting character. But I found some of the attitudes toward female characters to be quite odd in terms of the fact that the novel is set in the mid-1980s; for example, in the mid-1950s it might be reasonable for people to assume that an unmarried 35-year-old woman would probably be a virgin, but that certainly would not be the reasonable assumption to make in the 1980s! There’s a bit of that sort of cognitive dissonance going on throughout this novel; nevertheless, the story and style of writing are still enough for me to make a mild recommendation. ( )

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