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[published by Bantam Books, 1996]

Eureka, as the saying goes. Recently, I've been getting terminally bored with RevWar books, but I finally stumbled over one I thoroughly enjoyed, and in a completely unexpected place: a genre romance which provides a surprisingly sophisticated handling of the Revolution.

This is not to say that it made a good first impression on me. I waded in with extremely pessimistic expectations. First off, it had arrived in my mailbox attached to a strongly negative review from Doc M (who thoroughly hated it), and second, the initial couple of chapters exhibited many of the expected RevWar clichés, a couple of big, shiny, in-your-face historical flubs, and a pretty generic introduction to "Bloody Ban" and the heartless massacre at Waxhaws. (Poor Abe Buford. Cut down in his prime again. Good thing he lived to talk about it for another 53 years.)

Anyway, by page 25 I was sliding into a "same old, same old" torpor and was prepared to skim the rest and give it a the usual low and short review. To give you an idea: One lovely day in June, 1780, a British lieutenant-colonel with the improbable name of Damien Powell is out riding around the Carolina Upcountry all by himself -- a good way to get dead, though this doesn't seem to have occurred to either him or the author -- on his beautiful-but-doomed chestnut horse. Powell is sorta/kinda an amalgam of Ban Tarleton, James Wemyss, and the stud-of-the-month. He's part Ban because he commands a legion ("Scarlet" in this case) and has an undeserved reputation as a butcher; part Wemyss because his troops are regular army rather than provincials, and all stud-of-the-month because he is, after all, the hero of a romance novel. I quite liked him on first acquaintance, even though a quick flip to the back of the book confirmed that -- with such stunning, mind-numbing predictability that it doesn't even begin to qualify as a spoiler -- he was fated to desert the British cause in the end.

Nosing around for a likely place to commandeer some dinner, Powell happens upon an attractive rebel harridan named Josephine, who is being randomly attacked by Indians. He saves her life, but gets wounded in the process. Despite her mouth-foaming, fire-spitting, jihad-starting hatred for everything and anything British, the harridan decides to nurse him back to health rather than leaving him to bleed to death in the middle of her yard. (Considering her choice of medical techniques, he should probably have died of gangrene anyway, but that's neither here nor there since 18th century medicine was a crap shoot at the best of times.) My first impression of the harridan, er, sorry, the heroine was that she needed someone to drop a house on her -- and, by preference, her numerous siblings, too -- then steal her ruby slippers. I figured the author would be more charitable to allow Powell to be caught and hanged on the last page, because doing the "ever after" thing with Josephine seemed a vastly crueler punishment than the gibbet.

Like I say, it didn't make a good first impression. But just when I was about to give up on it, Captain Lee (no relation to Harry) of the Continental Army arrived on the scene with a couple of stalwart helpmates in tow. They proceeded to discover Our Hero in Josephine's barn, foiled his attempt to escape, then set about "viciously clubbing Damien with their fists and muskets until blood was leaking from his mouth and he was staggering beneath their blows." (p58) His horse was mortally wounded in his attempt to run, and one of Lee's men refused to waste "good powder and shot on some dyin' Brit horse," preferring to "Let him suffer." (p58) This, of course, is not an unlikely attitude in that pre-SPCA world -- refusing to waste powder on a clearly dying animal, that is; worrying about the horse's political allegiance is pretty weird under any circumstances -- but we're talking about modern fiction, where it's a well-established tradition to use a streak of cruelty to animals to identify a villain who is evil beyond all redemption.

Continuing this unanticipated shattering of my anticipations, the equally noble Captain dispatches Damien off to the rebel camp to be tortured at leisure for information, then offers Josephine the privilege of becoming a rebel spy in Charleston. If she refuses, she and her pregnant sister-in-law will be arrested, tried and hanged for treason for helping Powell, which will leave her juvenile siblings to fend for themselves in the midst of the war.

By this time, Monk was catching my attention, offering up an inkling that she might actually be intending to break some new ground. And, despite various minor glitches and pickable bones, she did just that, and did it better than the authors of many of the supposedly serious and "reputable" novels I've uncovered. Albeit marred by peculiarities such as having an officer flogged by the British Army, her research is well above average, and could be held up as an example to numerous other writers (and screenwriters).

The plot itself doesn't break any new ground, being a well-established favorite: Two people from opposite political camps fall in love in the middle of a war and try to figure out some way to be together without betraying their respective causes. They don't quite succeed, because of course the situation makes that impossible, but the decisions and compromises they make are human and for a change they cut both ways. The latter has a lot to do with why I like this book buckets more than most of the others I've reviewed -- it isn't all give on one side, and all take on the other.

Jo's on-and-off career as a spy takes her from Charleston to the British Army camp at Camden, where her black-and-white political views break down as she discovers that the faceless monsters she wanted to see slaughtered en masse are a perfectly human mixture of good people and bad. Soon, she finds herself plagued by stabbings of conscience, knowing the information she passes across the lines endangers their lives. (Inevitably, of course, this cause-and-effect relationship slaps her in the face at the battle of Camden, with the death of a young officer she knew in Charleston.) This dilemma is dirt common in espionage fiction (and, one assumes, its real-world counterpart), and it says something about the exaggerated simplicity of RevWar fiction in general that it is worth commenting upon.

Powell, meanwhile, has his own problems, falling in love with a woman he really ought to hang and trying to figure out how to keep her alive without losing his honor or sacrificing the lives of the men within his command. He doesn't do a bad job of it -- certainly better than I expected. His biggest sin is sensible within the context of his culture: he's far too slow to believe the actions of a woman could endanger his cause. (His historical counterparts tended to suffer the same unfortunate foible.)

The supporting cast, historical and original, is surprisingly large and generally enjoyable. Although he only has a couple of scenes, Monk provides a good interpretation of Earl Cornwallis, showing him as both a soldier and "a grieving husband and father, for whom the war was a form of escape." (p344) Frank Rawdon gets a brief cameo, but not enough to become an individual. Ban Tarleton, alone among the real-world cast, suffers the customary hype -- if you ever need a short checklist of all the "Bloody Tarleton" legends, this is a good place to look -- but I have learned not to let that be a show-stopper, if the rest of a book is interesting. In this case, I doubt it represents anything more than the difficulty of finding decent research materials.

The original cast are a well mixed lot. Most popular fiction incarnates the 18th century British Army in one of two ways. Either they are, to a man, a gang of miscreants, rapists and murderers, or else the enlisted men are downtrodden victims of an officer caste composed of sadists, incompetents and toffee-nosed twits. (Bernard Cornwell's Redcoat springs instantly to mind as an example of the latter, but he does the same schtick in the Napoleonic-era Sharpe's series so his dislike of officers isn't specific to the RevWar period.) Monk does, indeed, populate her plot with one sadist, a couple of vaguely toffee-nosed (but ultimately likeable) twits, and a pair of would-be rapists, but they are part of a mixed population which also includes family men (and their wives), honorable officers (including a childhood friend of Powell's who is by far my favorite character), and smart and loyal private soldiers.

Heck, some of the latter can even find their way through the woods without getting lost. The absolute funniest moment in the book comes when Captain Lee is bragging, "These woods are thick and dark. A man could easily lose himself in them. I have the advantage of knowing exactly where I am going, while your redcoats will be stumbling around like blind buffoons, wondering where the hell they are," only to lose his smile of triumph when he realizes he's been quietly surrounded by a half-dozen of Powell's dragoons. (p333-4) Aside from Lee, there aren't many rebel characters involved, since most of the action takes place behind British lines, but the few we meet also range across a more-believable-than-average mixture of types.

I don't even have huge problems with the ending, now that I've seen it in context. I suppose Monk constructed one of the best available to her, bounded as she was by the pragmatic, real-world limits on what a publisher would buy. I've encountered far, far, far worse. It positively glows when compared to the resolution of, say, A Patriot's Heart or Redcoat.

There are bits I could complain about (loudly), but if I gathered together all the truly painful and wince-inducing paragraphs, I doubt I'd have more than ten pages. There are a couple of other books in this collection from which I'd be hard pressed to glean that much material that didn't make me wince. Overall, I had lots of fun with it, and I'm tired of complaining. Yes, it's a romance -- which is certainly a show-stopper for many readers -- and yes, it is far from sophisticated when measured against war fiction in general. But RevWar fiction is an aberrant case, and in this arena it soars way above the crowd.