From the opening pages of Heartsick, in which Chelsea Cain describes--in excruciating detail--Gretchen Lowell's brutal torture of Archie Sheridan, through the graphic sex scenes of Sweetheart and the gory murders of Evil at Heart, I've had a thing for the Beauty Killer series. I'm not going to sit here and argue that Cain is a titan of literature, because she's not. And I fully concede that the books did, at times, approach camp (and softcore porn, to boot). But take it from someone who has spent the last two months trying to slog through a Great Work of American Literature (The Sound and the Fury): sometimes, you just want to have fun, dammit.

The Night Season sees Gretchen Lowell still in the pokey, and Archie trying to get back to something approaching normal (there's a point in the book where another character tells him he's looking a bit better: "Terrible for anybody else. But for you? Not bad."). Of course, this wouldn't be a Chelsea Cain novel if the body count didn't start stacking up, so it's not too long before the Willamette River, gorged on the torrential rains that have been drenching Portland, starts spewing out corpses. At first, the police suspect that the sorry souls have simply drowned, but they soon discover that the victims have been poisoned, and it's up to Archie and his team to figure out who's responsible. Meantime, Susan (sporting a new hair color), is investigating the origins of a skeleton found in the woods--a skeleton she suspects may have something to do with the small town of Vanport, which was washed away in its entirety by floods more than a half century ago. Could that decades-old tragedy have any bearing on Archie's case (if you don't already know that the answer is "yes," I don't know what to tell you. You clearly haven't read enough suspense novels).

People who have a hard time suspending disbelief will almost certainly find this novel almost too implausible to get through, but I plowed through it in a day. Again, blame it on William Faulkner (God knows I've been blaming almost every bad thing that has happened in my life lately on him), but I just couldn't put this book down. Reading about Archie and Susan again was like running into old (if distinctly sad sack and twee, respectively) friends, and I couldn't get enough. I remember reading Heartsick at about the same time I picked up Tana French's In the Woods, and though I find the latter the superior book, Archie Sheridan is right up there with Rob Ryan (and Steve Hamilton's Alex McKnight) as one of my favorite contemporary fictional detectives.

So, if you're like me, and stuck forcing yourself to make it through a book that some old farts somewhere decided to include in the canon of 20th century American literature, and you need a break, well...pick up The Night Season and indulge yourself.