As Wycliffe and Death in a Salubrious Place, by W.J. Burley, begins, Chief Superintendent Wycliffe is summoned to an island off the coast of Cornwall after a young woman is found brutally murdered in a disused quarry. It soon becomes apparent that the villagers suspect the stranger in their midst, a former pop star who has bought a large cottage and uses a barn to arrange dances and concerts for the young people, who of course worship him; but the singer has more than one secret to keep from the islanders - and from Wycliffe.... This is the fourth in a long-running series written between the late 1960s and 2002, when Burley died; the series was also made into a television series in the U.K. I like them particularly because of the setting, having spent part of my childhood in Cornwall, although this novel is set somewhere else completely; I also like Wycliffe, who is one of those follows-his-own-intuitions cops who is also thoughtful and even poetic at times ("[Wycliffe]... stood with his arms resting on the rail staring into the harbour. He was trying to decide what colour the water was. Blue? Green? Blue-green? It was shot with gold - or yellow and the tip of each tiny ripple was silvered. If you added to that a certain indefinable translucency... He wondered, too, why he had ever become a policeman and why a detective? He hadn't a clue what to do next.") Given the time in which it was written, there's a lot of casual sexism in this novel, but if one can get past that, it's an interesting read. It's not necessary to have read the earlier books in the series to enjoy this one. Recommended, albeit mildly. ( )

Abridged audiobook on 3 CDs of the fourth book in the Wycliffe series. Jack Shepherd (Wycliffe in the tv series) does a good job on reading, and while I was familiar with the plot from reading the book some years ago, I think the abridgement should work reasonably well for someone coming to it fresh. ( )