Best-selling author Ruth Stanton's homecoming after three months abroad is fraught with tension. The famous film director Paul Trevena is in love with her, and is doing his utmost to break up her marriage. Life in the Derbyshire Dales village has its tensions too. Bill Lynch, the landlord of the Quiet woman, is known to be having an affair with the ever-compliant Judy Scroop, and when his wife, Olive, disappears, he is suspected by many of having done away with her. What makes it even odder, a few days later, Judy disappears too...