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Laura Miller explains that like Dostoyevsky’s “Crime and Punishment,” Paul Collins’ “Duel With the Devil” offers deep insight into society through its handling of a grisly crime, offering a window into New York's political and social climate in the 1800s:

That’s how Paul Collins uses the famous real-life murder mystery at the center of “Duel With the Devil.” This sensational crime took place in Manhattan in December, 1799, on the very brink of a new century (or not quite, if you’re the sort of pedant who insists that the millennium didn’t really turn until New Year’s 1801 — and yes, those people were around back then, too!). The body of a young Quaker woman, Elma Sands, was found at the bottom of a well in Lispenard Meadows, a swath of marshy, undeveloped land that separated New York City proper from Greenwich Village, approximately where the neighborhood of Soho stands today. The guy almost everyone liked for the killer was Levi Weeks, a carpenter who lived in the same boarding house as Sands, an establishment run by Sands’ cousin, Catharine Ring, and her husband, Elias.

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Based on the press release, the season follows a new case that unfolds over the course of 12 episodes:

A year after closing the Rosie Larsen case, Sarah Linden is no longer a detective. But when her ex-partner Stephen Holder's search for a runaway girl leads him to discover a gruesome string of murders that connects to a previous murder investigation by Linden, she is drawn back into the life she thought she'd left behind.

And so the saga continues, with production beginning Feb. 25 in Vancouver.

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“The Killing,” the acceptably rated but truly mediocre detective series, wrapped up its second season and the mystery of “Who Killed Rosie Larsen” in anticlimatic fashion this June. (I suspect, within a year, more than half of the people who actually watched “The Killing” won’t remember who the killer was. Forget everyone else who was just gawking at it.) Later that month, the network that aired the show, AMC, opted not to renew the series, its attendant rainstorms, cacophonous chewing and heedless pacing and plotting for a third season and, god forbid, another epically mishandled mystery. It is a commentary on both the fractured state of TV ratings (1.4 million people, the number who watched the finale, is too many for a wannabe TV player like Netflix of DirecTV to turn down) and the cynical ways that certain tropes of fan culture have been adopted by big corporations.

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And yet, as I have kept on keeping on with Season 2 of “The Killing,” which finished last night, my furious passion has faded away, replaced by a duller equanimity. Linden and Holder are not very good at their jobs, but the actors who play them — Mirelle Enos, Joel Kinnaman — sure are. The thing that was meant to happen in the first season -- wherein the audience was made to care so much about the characters that the outcome of the murder investigation was not the show’s only appeal -- kind of started to happen. Sure, I found every single one of this season’s scenes with Mitch (Rosie Larsen’s mom, who fled home to take an emotional walkabout of the seedy motels of the Pacific Northwest) to be mind-numbingly irrelevant, but watching Holder and Linden cracking jokes in a car? Any time, especially now that Linden has given up her disgusting gum-smacking habit and started smoking real cigarettes again.

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So, at the end of last season, it was revealed that big-time suspect and mayoral candidate Darren Richmond probably didn’t kill Rosie, because the photo evidence implicating him was fake. But how do we know for sure he didn’t do it?

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Wright turns to the doctor and asks, “When are you going to tell him?”

“Tell him what?” the doctor responds.

"That he can't walk."

"Patients usually notice themselves pretty quickly," he answers.

This quick scene grabbed my attention. As doctors, we are -- by any ethical standard of modern medicine -- obligated to tell our patients the truth. (Richmond's physician does tell Wright that he'll tell the councilman he is paralyzed.) But study after study of physician behavior suggests that’s not always the case -- especially when the details are about grave diagnoses like paraplegia, cancer or dementia.

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Under normal circumstances, without the ending heard round Twitter, “The Killing” would be the sort of series — a middling, dull cop show — that would fall out of the critical conversation and DVR lists, leaving only the fans (they exist, as the comment section below should prove). To ward off another disaster, AMC has said that the murderer will not be revealed until the end of the season. 13 more episodes of red herrings, shoddy policework, and bockmail accounts would normally be too much for people who didn’t like the show very much and were only looking for a resolution to stick around. But these aren’t normal circumstances: the show is a curio. How will it rebound?

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Of course Councilman Darren Richmond is the killer, I thought, as detective Sarah Linden arrived at a victory rally to slap the cuffs on him. How could it have been anyone else? 

Besides the "Murder, She Wrote" rule that holds that the highest-paid guest star in a TV mystery nearly always ends up being ID'd as the murderer, Richmond was the only character on "The Killing" with a tragic aura, and the only one who could seem achingly sincere one minute and utterly self-serving the next. Plus: He was a politician. The psychological explanation tendered by this episode and last week's -- Richmond's womanizing and whoring were attempts to re-create aspects of his relationship with his late wife -- was just coherent and compelling enough to fly as the context for a killing, if not necessarily the trigger for coldblooded murder. You could see Richmond's compulsion leading to some sort of tragic accident, misunderstanding or sudden paroxysm of despair.  ("You notice something about Richmond's women?" detective Holder asked Linden, examining a newspaper story about the councilman's sex life. "They all got brown hair, brown eyes, white pale skin.")

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At a couple of points it gave me flashbacks to watching late-season episodes of "The Sopranos" -- the kind of installments where five or six potentially explosive plotlines were percolating and there were just a couple of episodes left to go on the season, but the show stubbornly decided to just pause everything and wander down the primrose path and meditate for a while on this or that tangential subplot, prompting viewers to grumble among themselves that they were being abused and mistreated and otherwise taken for granted. (I love it when I expect a show to zig and it zags instead, denying me whatever it was that I wanted when I tuned in that week. Does that make me a masochist?)

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Last night's episode, ironically but appropriately titled "I'll Let You Know When I Get There", was much stronger than its predecessor, and the direction (by Ed Bianchi, one of the best series TV directors alive) was smashingly atmospheric. But that's hardly a compliment considering how horrible last week's episode was. And at a script level, this one wasn't anywhere close to being the Hail Mary pass that the show needed to make up for its gross violations of common sense, not to mention its borderline cruel deception of an audience that thought it was committing to a semi-plausible portrait of a murder's impact on a community but ended up stuck in a super-slow-motion version of a "Law and Order: Criminal Intent" episode.

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Last night's episode, "Undertow," threw the show's flaws into sharp relief. The terrorism subplot has been a waste of time. Ditto the related scenes dealing with the prime suspect in Rosie Larsen's murder, her Somalian-American teacher Bennet Ahmed (Brandon Jay MacLaren). With the conspicuous exceptions of Fox's "24" and Showtime's "Sleeper Cell," post-9/11 American series have rarely dragged Muslims into crime plots except to chide American jingoism. Sure enough, "The Killing" has gone down that road, too. The to-and-fro over ethics in Seattle's mayoral campaign and Detective Sarah Linden's (Mirielle Enos) workaholic tendencies destroying her home life were almost as annoying as the FBI business. (Spoilers ahead.)

Industry scuttlebutt says that "The Killing" is about to be renewed for a second season, but at this point that sounds less like a promise than a threat. Last night's installment contained two of the dumbest twists I've ever seen in a show that prides itself on being smart.

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It's a sign of just how magnetic Kinnaman's performance is -- and how great and unpredictable "The Killing" is -- that for at least two episodes, I actually thought Detective Holder was the perp. Between his temper flares and the sly evasions native to any former undercover narcotics cop, Holder seemed a likely candidate for Man Leading a Double Life. It turns out I was right on that last count-- recently, we discovered Holder is in the shaky first year of recovery from meth addiction. As his character evolves into someone more complicated and vulnerable, I feel comfortable nixing him from the suspects list. But there's a reason I keyed in to him so powerfully: He may not be the show's killer -- but he is likely its breakout star.

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AMC's "The Killing" is the most engrossing American mystery series since the first season of "Murder One," maybe since "Twin Peaks." But it's starting to seem like less of a solvable puzzle-box whodunit by the week -- assuming, of course, that the recent flurry of new suspects and motives and incriminating histories doesn't end up amounting to a gigantic, swarming school of red herring.

Last night's installment, "Vengeance," was the series' best directed and acted episode to date. The only thing that stopped it from eclipsing the series' pilot were a few clunky moments and lines pertaining to Rosie Larsen's teacher Bennet Ahmed (Brandon Jay McLaren), his mysterious and still unseen Islamic teacher Muhammad, and the issue of anti-Muslim sentiment, which boiled over in Seattle once word leaked out that Bennet was under suspicion. The instant furor seemed credible, especially given how ruthlessly the incumbent mayor has exploited Bennet's arrest to damage his strongest opponent, councilman Darren Richmond (Billy Campbell). But the Rush Limbaugh-like radio rant and Mitch's mom's bigoted lament felt too scripted, and political correctness makes Bennet's guilt highly unlikely (I doubt he'll even turn out to have been an accomplice). And surely "The Killing" is too smart to expand this stuff into a "24"-like terrorism story! I bet this entire thread will turn out to have been a distraction meant to help run out the series' time clock. There were other irritants, too: For instance, from the instant we saw Sarah's lie-detector stare in episode one, we knew damn well she was never going to leave Seattle to join her boyfriend, so why keep dwelling on it?

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