Wycliffe and How to Kill a Cat is the second novel in a series by W. J. Burley, written in the 1970s. Detective Chief Superintendent Wycliffe is ostensibly on holiday with his wife, at an unnamed Cornish resort town, but he feels it only fitting that he should drop in on the local police station to say hello. As it happens, a young woman has just been found murdered and disfigured, and the local Chief Superintendent is on sick leave due to ulcers, so naturally Wycliffe agrees to look into the case. It takes some time to identify the victim, who turns out to be the very young wife of a local businessman; but the woman had left her husband a couple of years previously and seemed to have fallen in with a bad crowd. There is, in any event, no shortage of suspects, and Wycliffe must mingle with these unsavory people in order to learn the truth.... This is a fun series, one that I only recently discovered. Wycliffe is a complicated person who doesn't have much use for plodding detail work in his job; he believes that he must personally get to know the victims he encounters in order to solve their murders, and so while he leaves the traditional police work to his subordinates, he tends to go off on his own, feeling his way into the lives of the victims. The Cornish setting is lovely and contrasts very nicely with the grit and grime of the criminal worlds that Wycliffe investigates. There's certainly some sexism here, but one must keep in mind the times in which it was written; I didn't let it bother me, because of that. Recommended. ( )

[2006-11-25] Another mystery from early in the Wycliffe series. As usual, it's as much about the characters as about the actual murder inquiry. In this one a young woman who worked as a striptease artist is found dead -- but why was she working as a stripper when she was respectably married to a devoted husband? And why did the killer leave behind a thousand pounds in cash? Short by today's standards, but an entertaining book.