Much Ado About Jackby Christy EnglishSourcebooks Casablanca, 2014 Christy English's latest novel, Much Ado About Jack, features a, shall we say arresting cover illustration (by the irrepressible Robert Papp, who seems to specialize in more anodyne fare - kids, cats, and cucumbers, by the look of it - but who can, when drafted, uncork a romantic stunner and has even been known to do a tasteful rendering or two of a certain familiar face): a strapping British seaman who's paused only long enough to throw a service jacket over his sweaty muscles before sitting back to pin the viewer with a sultry gaze.It's a cover that says some things about Christy English's book, and some of those things are puzzling. The fact that the seaman in question looks to be about twenty but is wearing the jacket of an admiral hints that Much Ado About Jack, a novel set in 1818, will be full of historical inaccuracies - and this is puzzling because English's debut novel, 2010's The Queen's Pawn, and its follow-up, 2011's To Be Queen, were two very good and very accurate novels about that much-storied figure, Eleanor of Aquitaine. Those two novels seemed to set a course for English that had a lot more to do with Philippa Gregory than Jackie Collins, and yet in her last three books - the Shakespearean-themed How to Tame a Willful Wife, Love on a Midsummer Night, and the present volume - have left Medieval England for the height of the Regency period, and they've left historical decorum for hot-and-heavy hijinks. It's an odd switch, a little like finding Hilary Mantel dabbling in divorcee porn.And indeed there are historical inaccuracies a-plenty in Much Ado About Jack, but they're foisted on the reader with a very deliberate wink; these books clearly represent English having fun and not caring quite so much about plausibility. A certain extra suspension of disbelief is gently requested.So it's fitting, perhaps, that the least believable thing about Much Ado About Jack is the heroine at the heart of the story, Angelique Beauchamp, the widowed Countess of Devonshire. She's beautiful and wealthy, and she was for a long time married to a man entirely unworthy of her:

Geoffrey Beauchamp, Earl of Devonshire, had never fully accepted his wife, not even in his bed. Only once or twice had he bothered to have her before turning back to his whores. In spite of all that, she had loved him, perhaps not the man he truly was but the man she thought he was, the man she had fallen in love with when she was seventeen.

The Earl is dead when the book opens, and Angelique herself has changed dramatically from that love-struck girl. She's now notorious in high society as a woman who "travels where she pleases and sleeps with any man who catches her fancy," and who, indeed, finds herself rubbing up against a handsome stranger on the deck of a ship she owns, the Diane, before she's even learned his name (she "stood close to him, her cheek pressed against his chest, [and] she caught the scent of leather and spiced rum," and so forth). The stranger is Captain James Montgomery, the sultry cover-boy who's so rudely elbowed Angelique off the front of her own book, and the thrill he elicits makes Angelique briefly hopeful that her heart, scored both by her dead husband and by the highly unsatisfactory lovers she's taken since, might still be capable of some feeling. "All was not lost," she tells herself, "if she could still feel desire, even for a common sailor."The fact that in the actual, historical 1818, all would indeed be lost if a Countess ever found herself thinking such things (let alone acting on them, repeatedly and enthusiastically) isn't a fact we're meant to dwell on in Much Ado About Jack. Despite its modest store of historical details - the Prince Regent shows up, as you might expect he would - this novel is pretty clearly set, mentally if not materially, in the 21st Century, and English has decided not to care (it's impossible that the author of those Eleanor of Aquitaine novels could simply not know) that this is an impossible contrast. In 2014, a famous young woman of 18 can have multiple highly-publicized lovers and experience nothing more distressing than stardom as a result; in 1818, a woman behaving as Angelique behaves would be mocked, scorned, and cast out of society - that is, she'd be ruined, a word that has by now thankfully lost all its meaning but one that once meant everything.When Captain Jack's friend Lord Pembroke summarizes Angelique, it should spell her doom:

"I have it on good authority that she is a lovely woman. Intelligent, well-spoken, a woman who makes her own way in the world. But I would not recommend her to an adder."

But instead, it just intrigues our randy sea-dog:

"Why not?""Some women are complicated. Angelique is one of them.""Maybe I like complicated.""Since when?"

As Montgomery himself later confesses to Angelique:

"You are a woman to muddle a man's mind. But you are a woman who can't be conquered. If you were some lightskirt I met in a tavern, I wouldn't be here."

Of course, by that point in English's narrative, you're either, so to speak, on board with the spirited story she's telling or else you've already decamped for the familiar tomes of Georgette Heyer. English's remaining readers - and I suspect they'll be many, many - are treated to a tale that's one part anachronistically acrobatic sexual antics, one part saturated love of Shakespeare's comedies, and one part classic mismatched-lovers Regency stuff, as when Angelique finds herself appreciating her man-jack for the dozenth time:

He would never be known as a Corinthian, dressed as he was in clothes that would serve as well on a ship as they would on a hunt. His cravat was tied with flair, but she knew for a certainty that he did not keep a man, that he had tied it himself. Something about that simplicity refreshed her, the same way the Shropshire air did, bringing her back to herself in a way no other man ever had.

That's neatly put, and after some of the well-played dramatic complications you'd expect from a fan of Shakespeare, Much Ado About Jack finds its way to being both satisfying and, against all odds, heart-warming. And if this sort of thing is more fun for its author than writing the 189,000th novel about poor Queen Catherine of Aragon, well, who are we to begrudge it?