Guilty pleasures

The Whitbread Book Awards have undergone a revamp, and under a new sponsorship deal they will be the Costa Book Awards. They will be announced on 10 January 2007.

The Costa Book Awards just undertook a survey in the UK to find out which authors were considered "guilty pleasures".

Stephen King was revealed as the UK's favourite literary guilty pleasure author. It turns out that 85% of us have favourite authors that we enjoy reading but wouldn't necessarily own up to in public.

The top five authors most secretly enjoyed are:

1. Stephen King
2. J.K. Rowling
3. John Grisham/Dan Brown
4. Danielle Steele/Catherine Cookson
5. Terry Pratchett

If you have a literary guilty pleasure that you want to conceal, you can download one of four specially designed book jackets and ensure no-one can judge you by your book jacket.

This provoked me into thinking of other trashy but enjoyable reads:
Sergeanne Golon - The Angelique series featuring a golden haired minx and her adventures in the time of Louis XIV in France. The beautiful and courageous Angelique de Sance de Monteloup, the daughter of an impoverished nobleman, and the gallant, intelligent and charming Joffrey Comte de Peyrac discover and share a love that few people ever experience. However they have only a brief time to enjoy their happiness together before they are cruelly torn apart by forces beyond their control. See this Literature map of Sergeanne Golon.

The Library still has the Angelique books in Store.

Can you think of other authors of pleasurable potboilers?
How about Harold Robbins, Jackie Collins, Shirley Conran ...?