First, Karyn Monk took on the French Revolution; now she’s tackled the American one. It’s a three-book deal – could Russia be next?

No matter – in the meantime, her fans can lose themselves in the voluminous folds of The Rebel and the Redcoat, a romance replete with more twists and turns than a brimming plate of rotini. Or, as my Spanish friend Manolo might say, a novel muy retorcido – that is, very convoluted.

The novel opens in the summer of 1780 when Josephine Armstrong is defending her family’s farm from Indian attack and, despite her doughtiness, must be rescued by a handsome stranger, who turns out to be Lt. Col. Damien Powell, one of the hated Redcoats her rebel brothers are fighting against. However, though she is a rebel, Josephine is also a humane woman, and when Damien is wounded by one of the attacking warriors, she nurses him in the family barn. In the process, she notices his “chiseled jaw,” his “hair and eyebrows black as night,” and notes: “he was not an unattractive man.”

The twists and turns of the pair’s inevitable and ill-fated love take the reader to Charles Town and its high society and behind the lines into a British army camp, as Josephine becomes a spy for the rebels in an attempt to live down her sin of harboring the cursed Redcoat.

As with Monk’s first novel, Surrender to a Stranger, the protagonists find that their desire supersedes the black-white dichotomies of war, and therein lies the entire tension of the lovers’ struggle towards unity.

More sheltered readers of more traditional romances will find in Monk’s heroines a bold modern view: both Jacqueline, the aristocrat in Surrender to a Stranger, and Josephine, in The Rebel and the Redcoat, are feisty women who are also lusty wenches. Not only do they desire the handsome heroes, they respond to them avidly. No genteel truncations of the sex act here – Monk allows her heroines to consummate their unions, and tells us all about it. She even creates heroes who are firm practitioners of foreplay. Not only do they seize their women masterfully, they are as willing to give pleasure as to take.

This is not the romance novel we used to know. But, despite the full sex lives, Monk’s heroines are staunch proponents of “family values.” Both Jacqueline and Josephine take in motherless children – Josephine even travels with a fluffy striped kitten! – and enfold their heroes in domestic harmony.

By the end of The Rebel and the Redcoat, both Jo and Damien have left the war frontier to make a life together, taking with them an orphan baby named Emily and a one-handed drummer boy named Tommy – even as Jo is carrying their love child: “Another child. Part rebel. Part Redcoat.”

And yes, as soon as they can, Jo and Damien will get married. The union of opposites can succeed. Or, to quote another American writer – this one a romantic of quite another sort – “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”